How do you implement notifications?

Checking the collective wisdom for ways of improvement.

• What's your solution?
• How do you treat read notifications?
• Do you use email and mobile notifications?

I use raw Firestore. I created a notifications collection with user documents that restricts access only to the user using the Firestore policies.

In view I created a "notification center" where all notifications are gathered.

On the backend I built several notification types. I send the relevant type to Firestore using the admin SDK, saved under the relevant receiving user. There's also a sender field. The whole thing is being managed by an internal notification service.

type CoLearnRequestNotification struct {
    ID                  string              `json:"ID"`
    ActionID            string              `firestore:"actionID" json:"actionID"`
    Type                string              `firestore:"type" json:"type"`
    CreatedAt           string              `firestore:"createdAt" json:"createdAt"`
    Requester           User                `firestore:"requester" json:"requester"`
    Read                bool                `firestore:"read" json:"read"`
}

On the front-end I use a Firestore listener. I use VueFire and VuexFire since I'm on VueJS. I store them in the Vuex store.

In order for a notification to be considered as "read", the user has to click an "x" button and remove it from the notification gadget.

Email: Currently building an internal email service. Mobile: we don't have a mobile app... yet.

Comments

[Koas]

Hi! I use Telegram since that allows the user to reply and interact with my web app.

[Yarden Even]

Your app is a mobile app? If so, do you collect your users' numbers upon registration?

I was referring to in app notifications and not push notifications. So it could be notifications about your post that received a feedback or someone inviting you to a video session.

I'm not sure there's a use case for them replying back to the "system" for this type of notifications.

I should probably rephrase my title as "How would implement an internal notification system?"

[Koas]

Oh... Ok, I think I misunderstood the subject! :)

Mine is a web app, mobile users access it via their regular web browser, I use Telegram to send them push notifications and they can reply to it via Telegram.

[Yarden Even]

Nice setup! Can't help me here, but definitely gives me food for thought for implementing push notifications.