How not to send FCM to users who don't want to receive push?

Question

With GCM, when user expresses their preference whether they are willing to get notifications, we could mark their preference as active or inactive

How can I achieve similar effect with FCM?

When user says they don't want to receive pushes, we'd have to unsubscribe the user from all the topics we have?

Are there better approaches?

don't think so, I think the only way is for the user to unsubscribe from the topic as you said — Peter Haddad, Mar 02 '18 at 16:54
Unsubscribing from a topic would be the recommended way to do it. However it would depend on what notifications you were sending via topics. — Arthur Thompson, Mar 02 '18 at 20:52

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 06 '18 at 15:35

Depending on the scenario, unsubscribing from the topics is the way to go.

However, if your goal is to simply prevent the user from seeing any push notifications appearing on their screen, a workaround I could think of is have a setting (e.g. enable/disable notifications) that identifies if you should/shouldn't display a notification every time the user receives one.

For example, user installs the app. Initially, the setting defaults to enabled. Push notifications are displayed normally. If user disables it, when the device receives the message, you do not create a notification display.

For this to work, I'm thinking the checking should be done inside the method where you create the notification (e.g. sendNotification).

So the scenario now is that the device is still technically receiving the notification, it's just that you're not showing/displaying it to the user.

Note: I haven't tried to go with this scenario myself, so I'm not sure if this is breaking any best practices. I would still go with the unsubscribing if it were me though. It's easier.

How not to send FCM to users who don't want to receive push?

1 Answers1