Can I use Firebase to send push notification to a specific user on iOS device without needing APN?

Question

I have an Angular project for kindy portal which is where teacher post kids/students post of what they are doing during the day and when a new article is published for a child I want to send a push notification to that specific parent on iOS device.

Currently some previous employee used some third party stuff or some technology to create the website to application (from what I know they just wrote a line of code to reference the same code for website to the app) so people will think its an application but its loading stuff from the web. And I don't have details of it or where the code is for it so I am trying to figure out if its possible to do without the need of APN so I can continue working on it or if its not possible to do without APN then I can't as I don't have access to that source code of how they made it to app.

So my question is: if I want to use Firebase to send the notification on iOS device to specific user is Firebase enough or smart enough to do it by its own or do I need APN to be able to get the user token from their iOS device and use that to send the notification?

Answer 1

As a way for Apple to regulate push notifications only Apple can send it. So yeah you MUST have APNS.

Reasons for that are:

• Bad app developers would just bombard users with notifications. APNs can drop high frequency messaging to maintain a quality use experience.
• Apple has a better way to coalesce notifications. Especially silent/background notifications. This has power saving benefits.
• Apple can give special entitlement for emergency apps. Example certain notifications can bypass the app’s notifications settings if you have the ‘critical alert’ entitlement.
• By Apple governing the whole payload, payloads then have a standard for sound, localization, summary, subtitle, threading, coalescing, etc. If there wasn’t for Apple then each company would have had their own standard. Imagine some sending in json, others in xml format and and all with different keywords.