Push notifications is a feature that has the biggest potential to increase engagement in your app, and to regularly bring back users to your app. Whether you have a social networking app, an online community app, e-commerce app, utility app, or any other type of app, push notifications can have a big impact on engagement. Mobile apps with push notifications are found to have 3 times more retention. Google has recently introduced a new platform: FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging) to handle notifications.

FCM is a new simplified and improved version of Google Cloud Messaging (GCM, that we were using in our Android app till now). FCM has all the features of GCM, plus some new features too!

We are always improving our app’s infrastructure, enhancing standards, and adding new features to help you grow faster, improve app quality, acquire and engage users. We’re glad to announce that we have now implemented this new platform of FCM in our Android app for SocialEngine.

Benefits of Firebase Cloud Messaging

• FCM does not have any limitation on number of subscribers to send push notifications.

• Lesser coding required than earlier, makes the app light-weight.

• FCM enables us to use one centralized library for numerous services like Push Notifications, Google Analytics, Google Ads, and lots more, unlike GCM. This also makes the app light-weight, and provides a good base for many new future developments.

Currently, FCM is implemented in our Android App for Push Notifications and Google Analytics. Our next goal is to implement Google Admob using Firebase, once Google makes the APIs for Admob live (currently, it’s in beta version) and to improve app performance by controlling number of API calls.

Note: Google has deprecated GCM but will continue to support its current version for existing app owners, and all new app owners are required to use FCM.

Being an existing app owner, your app would be using GCM for Push Notifications. But now, if you wish to use FCM for your app, then you can easily import your Android project by following the steps provided in this video tutorial.

FCM implementation is available in the latest version of our Android App product for SocialEngine. To get your Android App upgraded on Google Play to this version, please file a Support Ticket from your SocialEngineAddOns Client Area.

If you haven't yet got Mobile Apps for your online community, then get them now from here: https://www.socialengineaddons.com/socialengine-ios-iphone-android-mobile-apps-subscriptions.

For any queries, please feel free to contact us and we'll get back to you quick!