How To Set Up Firebase Push Notifications in a React Native App

A step-by-step tutorial to help you integrate FCM in your React Native app

Photo by Luís Perdigão on Unsplash.

Push notifications are a good way of increasing user engagement and keeping users up to date with the latest news and updates. In my opinion, the easiest way of adding push notifications to a mobile app is to use Firebase Cloud Messaging. FCM is available for a wide range of platforms (iOS, Android, Unity, web), and their documentation is pretty extensive.

You have a wide range of options when deciding how to use the service according to your needs. You can, for instance, simply send notifications directly from the console — anyone can do this. Here, you can provide a title and a body for the notification and some optional data represented in key-value pairs. The alternative (and the more elegant solution, in my opinion) is to do this on the backend. By doing so, manual human intervention will not be needed for sending notifications. In addition, when you will have thousands of users, each of them receiving personalized notifications based on their activity and updates, manually sending notifications from the console will be impossible.

In this tutorial, we will look into what you should do to add Firebase push notification support to your React Native app.