Need guidance regarding using FCM to communicate between devices

Question

I have the experience of developing android apps but I have no experience of developing a server.

Basically I want to send a message from one app (user) to another app (admin) using Firebase. So far, I have researched and found that this should happen in a manner similar to the following.

1. User app sends a message to server
2. Server sends message to firebase
3. Firebase sends message to admin app

Now the problem is that I have absolutely zero knowledge of making a server. One more limitation is that I think the server computer needs to be physically connected to a power source all the time? If that is the case then I cannot implement it on my own infrastructure due to low budget.

So I think that just like firebase provides solutions for maintaining data on google's servers, there must be free services for hosting and making the servers on the cloud.

If there are such services (not found on google's first page), please let me know.

If there is another solution (I remember maybe the late Parse had a solution), please let me know.

One more thing which may matter is that I don't need to transmit sensitive data. I can keep the sensitive data in firebase database and just transmit a reference between apps.

Answer 1

I hope you need only firebase database function to sync data between clients.
Setup will be like this,

1.Client Register to your server ( email & password ?).
2.Client Logins to server ( a simple HTTP API that returns a token with Firebase access token)

For Android client SDK example from GitHub here( To get started you need only the Firebase SDK no server part, though). To authenticate your user use the option described here about custom accesstoken, seems you here not mentioned which technology/stack in which you are trying to develop the server part, then I could give more specific answer.