Good afternoon,
I apologize in advance, as I know this is subjective. But, I'd very much love the opinion of a Xamarin expert.
I'm building a mobile application for a client using Xamarin targeting Android and iOS devices. We have a .NET Web API back-end application that is consumed by a MVC web application (hosted in Azure), and now our Xamarin application. Our API needs to send basic push notifications (to iOS and Android) when certain things happen.
I've configured push notifications (also targeting Xamarin projects) in the past, but it has been a few years. That configuration included Azure Notification Hubs and GCM (the GCM piece was recently updated to Firebase - still in combination with Azure Notification Hubs). All of that is working just fine.
After reviewing push notifications again, it seems as though Firebase has become something of a Notification Hub itself, handling both iOS and Android applications. There is plenty of documentation on setting up push notifications in a variety of ways, using just Firebase for both iOS and Android, using Firebase with Azure, using just Azure for iOS, etc.
So, my question is.. If you are a seasoned Xamarin developer creating a new iOS and Android targeted application with a .NET backend, would you use Azure Notification Hubs? Based on my reading, it seems as though the simplest approach would be to utilize Firebase for both iOS and Android, leave out the Azure Notification Hub piece of it, and use our back-end to make a single POST request to the Google API (i.e. https://fcm.googleapis.com/v1/projects/myproject-b5ae1/messages:send based on their documentation at https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud-messaging/send-message) to send a new push notification.
However, that doesn't sit very well with me considering that Microsoft is behind both Xamarin and Azure. My gut is telling me that I should be using Azure Notification Hubs. Could someone please provide some guidance? I feel like I'm not understanding something that's preventing me from being able to come to a good conclusion on my own.
Thanks,
Chandler
This seems to be a problem with the software architecture. Technically, notifications can be done for both Azure and IOS/Android notifications. But from user data statistics and future data service analysis, you need to consider whether the notification service you used before can continue to provide services for you. At the same time, if you are ready to abandon the previous use, you can slowly split some users to use the new notification service. From my personal point of view, this is the safest.