We have built a complete transport for push-notifications that can be used instead of (or in conjunction with) Google Firebase. A notification flow in our systems excludes Google APIs which means that if some app gets banned from Google’s push transport, their users can still be reached through our service. In a more optimistic world, you can continue using both systems to increase delivery rate and improve latencies. We will also deliver notifications in real time, with text/pictures etc, like Google does. Our service is free to use but the app that wants to use it is required to be deployed to RuStore.

There are 2 main components: Android SDK and backend API.

Android SDK provides the same interface as Firebase SDK does. It encapsulates registering a new device token, fetching and showing notifications.

Backend API is a drop-in replacement for Firebase API, in Mail (Почта Mail.ru) we managed to integrate RuStore push-notifications by simply changing an API host from Google’s to RuStore’s. We have a stateless API that is deployed to a distributed k8s cluster, pub/sub system and a web socket server (for real time notifications delivery), Scylla to store notifications and a Redis Cluster to store device tokens.