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My biggest problem with FCM is how hostile it is to open source and self-hosted services. If you want to push a message to a phone, you don't just need to be re

My biggest problem with FCM is how hostile it is to open source and self-hosted services. If you want to push a message to a phone, you don't just need to be registered with Google; you need to be the app developer. App developers cannot allow third parties to push to their app, because they'd have to give them their FCM credentials, which is a no-no. So the only way to get push notifications on, say, apps that provide a client for generic protocols or self-hosted services, is for either the app developer to run a proxy gateway (which inevitably runs into scalability issues forcing them to start charging for it or require registration with free quotas), or for you to create your own build of the app. I ended up having to do that with Linphone, rebuild it under my own app ID with my own FCM creds, just so I could get push notification integration with my own SIP server instead of having to keep a background SIP connection open to receive calls. This is completely silly, with the only free endgame being everyone has to compile their own apps and have one app installed for every potential provider, even if they share a protocol.

techslave 6y ago
> they'd have to give them their FCM credentials, which is a no-no. trivially addressed via a proxy, which you’d want anyway to properly monetize it
- jlokier 6y ago
  GP: "open source and self-hosted services" There's probably no wish to monetize, just to distribute working apps for free. You're right that the issue is easily addressed with a proxy. But now you need to maintain and pay for a proxy in perpetuity, for other people to use who aren't paying anything. Even if it's cheap, maybe you don't have the time. It will break occasionally. Knowing there are people who may depend on it 24x7x365 is burdensome too. You'd like to have vacations. It's not very open source friendly if other people can't just take your software and run it themselves without depending on you. Those other people can avoid depending on you by registering themselves with FCM, but having to do that is not open source or self-hosted friendly either, which was the GP's point.

techslave 6y ago

> they'd have to give them their FCM credentials, which is a no-no. trivially addressed via a proxy, which you’d want anyway to properly monetize it

jlokier 6y ago
GP: "open source and self-hosted services" There's probably no wish to monetize, just to distribute working apps for free. You're right that the issue is easily addressed with a proxy. But now you need to maintain and pay for a proxy in perpetuity, for other people to use who aren't paying anything. Even if it's cheap, maybe you don't have the time. It will break occasionally. Knowing there are people who may depend on it 24x7x365 is burdensome too. You'd like to have vacations. It's not very open source friendly if other people can't just take your software and run it themselves without depending on you. Those other people can avoid depending on you by registering themselves with FCM, but having to do that is not open source or self-hosted friendly either, which was the GP's point.