Best way to implement push notifications with Firebase

Question

I am an iPhone app coder, and I\'m using Firebase as my backend server. Firebase doesn\'t support Push Notifications, so I\'ve been trying to figure out how to include them

Answer 1

Here's the answer I got from the Firebase team:

Firebase currently does not have push notification feature. You can use Firebase Queue and GCM to implement push notification in your app. Queues can be used in your Firebase app to organize workers or perform background work like generating thumbnails of images, filtering message contents and censoring data, or fanning data out to multiple locations in your Firebase database. Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) is a free service that enables developers to send messages between servers and client apps and it is available in both iOS and Android.

You can push an object with some data to the /queue/tasks location in your Firebase using any Firebase client or the REST API. Workers listening at that location will automatically pick up and process the job. From that, your workers can make a GCM push notification.

(end of message from Firebase team)

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Here's my analysis:

It seems like there are a few solutions, but the two best ones are:

1) Use FirebaseQueue with Google Cloud Messaging.

2) Leverage the Push Notification functionality in Parse within the Firebase app.

I'm not sure which is better. Parse seems more proven, but Firebase Queue is more-easily integrated into the app (ie. it's nice have everything on Firebase and not having to set up a Parse app)

Anyways, I hope this thread helps out other people!