Azure Notification Hubs still reliant on GCM with 6 months to switch-off

3
votes

Google have deprecated GCM for delivering push notifications to Android apps, in favour of FCM. GCM will be switched off on April 11 2019 (See header here: https://developers.google.com/cloud-messaging/android/android-migrate-fcm)

Microsoft have provided a tutorial for setting up a new app with Azure Notification Hubs using FCM, however it still depends on the underlying GCM library (com.google.android.gms:play-services-gcm:12.0.0):

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/notification-hubs/notification-hubs-android-push-notification-google-fcm-get-started

With just 6 months until GCM switch off, my questions are therefore:

  • Will Azure Notification Hubs Android SDK be updated to remove the dependency on com.google.android.gms:play-services-gcm:11.8.0?

  • Will a GCM to FCM migration guide be written for existing apps using Azure Notification Hubs on Android?

  • Currently the Android Azure Notification Hubs SDK relies on a deprecated net.http.AndroidHttpClient, which has been totally removed in Android Pie. When will this be fixed?

  • What server side changes, if any, will be required to migrate from GCM to FCM when using Azure Notification Hubs?

1
androidazuregoogle-cloud-messagingfirebase-cloud-messagingazure-notificationhub
Work is underway in this fork to migrate from AndroidHttpClient to OkHttp: github.com/minyushov/azure-notificationhubs/commits/master – Andrew Ebling
Hi Andrew. Although your post is a pressing concern, I believe this off-topic here in Stack Overflow and too broad to answer. – AL.
I was actually asked to post here by @azuresupport and I would be grateful if you could not close the question - their support team is supposed to be answering here. – Andrew Ebling
Hi Andrew. I've retracted my close vote. I still believe that this is off-topic -- odd that Azure would use this as a channel. However, this instance is different. I hope they do respond to you here. Good luck. Cheers! – AL.
Thanks for your consideration and understanding - I appreciate it! – Andrew Ebling

1 Answers

1
votes

The Azure Notification Hubs team updated the SDK to address the issues you identified and also published this blog post describing the state of the GCM/FCM world as it relates to Azure Notification Hubs: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/blog/azure-notification-hubs-and-google-s-firebase-cloud-messaging-migration/ to address customer concerns.

No server-side changes needed.