Step-by-Step Guide to Setup Android Push Notifications with Amazon SNS
Android’s market share trend varies depending on the figures being considered (some say it’s up, while others suggest iOS has taken some market share back from Android). In any case, there’s no denying the dominance of these two platforms for mobile devices: 99.6 percent of new smartphones run Android or iOS.
To maximize your audience reach, targeting both these major mobile platforms with your push notifications should be a priority. Your push notification solution needs to be cross platform.
As we discussed in our previous post Step-by-Step Guide to Setup iOS Push Notifications with Amazon SNS, Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a fast, flexible notification service that lets you send notifications to multiple push notification platforms. In this post and the accompanying guide we’ll cover setting up SNS to send notifications to Android users with Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM).
To send push notifications to Android smartphone and tablet apps, you first setup a FCM project. We covered how to create your FCM project our post 3-Step Guide to Unlocking Benefits of Android Push Notifications. The diagram below provides an overview of the message sending process using SNS with FCM:
- A message from a company system is sent to your notification Pusher – a service that manages notification message sending, and communicates with platform-specific notification services via Amazon SNS
- Amazon SNS uses push notification credentials specific to your FCM project to securely communicate with FCM
- FCM dispatches notification messages to end user Android devices
Using Amazon SNS requires some setup to allow communication with platform-specific notification services. To use Amazon SNS with Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) for Android devices, you need the following:
- The API Key for your FCM project, which you can get from the FCM Console.
- A registration token for the Android App and devices you wish to send notifications to. We covered this in our post Add Push Notification Support to Your Android App in Just 4-Steps
- Amazon SNS configured to send push notification messages to the Android App endpoint
Download our guide for step-by-step instructions and screenshots on setting up Amazon SNS with FCM.
