How to disable Firebase push notifications in Unity from client side application?

Question

I have integrated Firebase into Unity project and it all works. I would like to integrate disabling of push notifications if user wants to disable them in his app. I haven't found solution in code for this, also there is one unanswered question same as mine, so I am posting new one just in case someone has come with a solution for this.

Answer 1

I managed to do this by using Firebase Messaging Topic and calling SubscribeAsync() and UnsubscribeAsync().

private void Start()
{
    if ( notificationsAreOn ) 
       InitFirebaseMessaging();
    else 
       DisableFirebase();
}

    private void DisableFirebase()
    {
        Firebase.FirebaseApp.CheckAndFixDependenciesAsync().ContinueWith( task => 
        {            
            var dependencyStatus = task.Result;

            if ( dependencyStatus == Firebase.DependencyStatus.Available ) 
            {    
                FirebaseAnalytics.SetAnalyticsCollectionEnabled( false );
                Firebase.Messaging.FirebaseMessaging.UnsubscribeAsync("VeryCoolTopic");
                Firebase.Messaging.FirebaseMessaging.TokenReceived += null;
                Firebase.Messaging.FirebaseMessaging.MessageReceived += null;        
            } 
            else 
            {
                UnityEngine.Debug.LogError(
                    System.String.Format("Could not resolve all Firebase dependencies: {0}", dependencyStatus)
                );
            }
        });
    }

    private void InitFirebaseMessaging()
    {

        Firebase.FirebaseApp.CheckAndFixDependenciesAsync().ContinueWith( task => 
        {            
            var dependencyStatus = task.Result;

            if ( dependencyStatus == Firebase.DependencyStatus.Available ) 
            {    
                FirebaseAnalytics.SetAnalyticsCollectionEnabled( true );
                Firebase.Messaging.FirebaseMessaging.SubscribeAsync("VeryCoolTopic");
                Firebase.Messaging.FirebaseMessaging.TokenReceived += OnTokenReceived;
                Firebase.Messaging.FirebaseMessaging.MessageReceived += OnMessageReceived;        
            } 
            else 
            {
                UnityEngine.Debug.LogError(
                    System.String.Format("Could not resolve all Firebase dependencies: {0}", dependencyStatus)
                );
            }
        });
    }

Then in the Firebase console when creating a message, use Topic as a target instead of User Segment.

You could also use disable whole Firebase by deleting the Firebase token using DeleteTokenAsync() but I haven't tested this because the the method with using subscribe and unsubscribe worked for me.

Answer 2

There are two types of messages that you can send with FCM: notifications messages, and data messages.

If your app is active, notification messages are delivered to your application code, which can decide what to do with it. When the app is not active, notification messages are automatically displayed by the system. There is not way to suppress this behavior.

Data messages are always delivered to your application code, which can decide what to do with them.

So if you want to allow the user to suppress the display of messages, you'll want to only send data messages, and then display them from within your application code.

Note that alternatively, you can find a way to not deliver messages to a user who has disabled notifications. How exactly to do this depends on your implementation. For example: if you're sending directly to FCM Instance ID tokens, you can skip the tokens of users who have disabled push notifications. And if you're using topic subscription to send messages, you can create a topic that users subscribe to to disable notifications, and then create conditions to exclude delivery to that topic.