4 posts tagged with "Push Notifications"

Every iOS app should leverage push notifications to boost user engagement and retention. Push notifications are a powerful tool, but implementing them in Swift 5 has been historically tricky since you usually needed a server. If you’re just getting started with your app development, chances are you’re already using Firebase as your backend. That’s great news – implementing push notifications with Firebase in Swift 5 is what we cover in this tutorial. In fact, we’ve followed exactly these steps to add push notifications to our Group Chat app.

While building the push notifications feature for our iOS Chat app, we've encountered the need to send device to device push notifications in Swift with Firebase. Until a while ago, this was not even possible without running your own server, but fortunately, Google Cloud Messaging platform has evolved tremendously within the last year, and now sending app-to-app push notifications directly from Swift is totally doable. Broadcasting remote push notifications from Firebase Console UI is straightforward since it only involves a few clicks on a nice GUI. But mobile apps are more complicated than that – in many cases, you need to notify a specific user about actions that were triggered by other users. A few concrete examples where we are using device to device push notifications in our Swift app templates:

With every release of Xcode, Apple provides us with extremely useful improvements and new features. And as always, from Xcode 11.4 (beta version – up until the publish date of this article), we get another piece of good news from them. That is we can simulate push notifications on the iOS simulator. Finally! Yes, you're not mistaken, it's time to say goodbye to the annoyance of testing on physical devices whenever we want to implement and test push notifications.

For tech entrepreneurs, who own online businesses about news, building a news reader iOS app has never been more rewarding, in terms of growing and retaining their audiences. Empowering your readers with a mobile app for their favorite news website is powerful. It's hard to imagine a better way of increasing user retention. On top of that, with the latest tools that are available for building mobile apps, creating a presence in the App Store has never had a greater return on investment.