Best way to notify my web users for new messages?

1 points by leavingcents ↗ HN
I'm building a chat app, which will work exclusively on my website.

iOS does not allow push notifications. Android users I talk to have their web-notifications disabled globally due to spam.

What are my options? Ideally cheap/free

2 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 12.1 ms ] thread
Only two realistic options --- polling or web sockets.

If you want instantaneous, real time, back and forth, chat type interaction, I'd say web sockets are the only real option. This implies that users will be active at the same time.

If you are ok with non-real time time, email like interaction, polling is probably better. This implies that users may not be active at the same time.

I'm assuming you are looking at a web app here.

Google Firebase?