About FCM's notification message and data message type, which has better receiving rate

Question

We are choosing to use FCM's notification message or data message (only for custom designs). We already know that custom designs data message perform better than the non custom design data messages. But we are wondering if notification message can have better receive rate than data message because it is using the system to show the notification. Anyone has done any investigation? If not, then what's the advantages the notification message type have

Answer 1

• It's an interesting question and topic of research. I faced the same the situation about a while ago.

According to firebase's documentation :

Notification messages are high priority by default, and collapsible--the following message will replace the current message if it's not delivered yet.

• In the custom data type payload, you can actually pass the notification priority to high. But.....

According to this document from firebase

High priority. FCM attempts to deliver high priority messages immediately, allowing the FCM service to wake a sleeping device when necessary and to run some limited processing (including very limited network access). High priority messages generally should result in user interaction with your app or its notifications. If FCM detects a pattern in which they don't, your messages may be de-prioritized. Android P introduced app standby buckets which limit the number of FCM high priority messages you can send to your app that don't result in the user using your app or viewing a notification. If in response to a high priority message, a notification is displayed in a way that is visible to the user, then your app standby bucket quota will not be consumed by that message.

• And now let's talk about my personal experience. I faced the same situation and the observations we noted with our QA were quite the same as their documentation.

Although after setting priority HIGH in data type payload we noticed random behaviour with some custom OS phones like Oneplus, Oppo etc. While in the case of notification type payload it was consistent and we were getting notification perfectly.

• So I advise that if you don't have a particular requirement to handle the data silently in the background just go with a simple notification payload.