Re: Web Push Notifications

I think the term "web push" defines a process in which data is pushed to
a client regardless of the clients current connection status. In other
words - as long as the client maintains a connection to it's server,
it's not really web-push - at least not in the sense the term is used
today. This having said: Apple, Google and Mozilla maintain their very
own web-push environments. It is convenient to use FCM (Firebase) as it
provides an API that enables us to send messages to all operating
systems - but it also gives a single entity control over all
environments. In our work, we try to push to the individual endpoints -
if we have data for Apple devices, we push to Apple, the Mozilla data
goes directly to Mozilla's servers and everything Google is delivered
via FCM.

Unfortunately - web-push is also highly useless for anything that would
really benefit from urgent notifications - such as important messages,
incoming Web-RTC calls or the like because a) Google / Chromium devs
seem not to be interested in fixing a bug that prevents web-push from
cutting through doze on Android-devices and b) Apple doesn't have it
(yet) on iOS. And even if the push reaches a device, all one can
currently do is to display a notification. It won't be delivered to your
app or web-site so you can't fetch data in the background and display it
whenever the user is ready.

It's sad - because web-push really could be a cool way to distribute
content and information, but it is not - at least not as it is today. As
to the question of whether or not there are overall volume stats
available ? You will need to get those from all providers and add FCM
distribution channels to get a good picture.

/rant

Michaela


On 2/24/19 9:01 AM, Andy Valencia wrote:
>> I am doing some analysis on web push notifications and I would love to know
>> if there's any list of websites that are using this technology, as well
>> as overall volume of web push notifications per platform. Is that
>> information available publicly somewhere?
> Of course, proper web push notifications are a decentralised technology,
> thus problematic to systematically measure.  I have deployed push
> notifications based on JSON-over-UDP (the most efficient), long polling
> (the next most efficient), and also Firebase Cloud Messaging.
>
> Note that push messaging has two components; the event on the original
> server and where it pushes, and then how that recipient gets word to one
> or more mobile devices.  I'm assuming, given this mailing list's charter,
> that it's the latter process which interests you.
>
> I suppose you could use Google's Firebase FCM as representative of all
> push notifications.  It's proprietary and closed source, so (like oh so
> many other things) you'll need to find out if Google thinks you should
> know the answer.  But it does re-centralize the web, thus providing
> a one-stop shop for a partial answer.
>
> Andy Valencia
>

Received on Sunday, 24 February 2019 20:40:15 UTC