do stream and sendbird require connections for notifications?

Question

I am building a messaging app and curious how stream and sendbird handle notifications.

stream and sendbird have caps (x% of MAU) on concurrent connections. A client needs a connection to a server to receive a message but is that the case with notifications? Because if that is the case, all clients need connections all the time and the concurrent connections will be around 100% of MAU which is very expensive.

Thanks, DK

Answer 1

From Sendbird's perspective (I am an employee of Sendbird), notifications are typically sent only to offline users meaning that an active connection would not be necessary. Depending on your implementation, and what devices are utilized, notifications are sent via APNs for Apple, FCM for Android and HMS for Huawei

https://sendbird.com/docs/chat/v3/ios/guides/push-notifications#1-push-notifications

Push notifications support both single and multi-device users and they are delivered only when a user is fully offline from all devices even when they use only one device. In other words, if a user is online on one or more devices, notifications aren't delivered and thus not displayed on any devices. Additional multi-device support for push notifications is also provided. If selected from your dashboard, for multi-device users, notifications are delivered to all online and offline devices. However, through iOS, notifications are displayed only on offline devices.

https://sendbird.com/docs/chat/v3/android/guides/push-notifications#1-push-notifications

Push notifications support both single and multi-device users and they are delivered only when a user is fully offline from all devices even when they use only one device. In other words, if a user is online on one or more devices, notifications aren't delivered and thus not displayed on any devices. Sendbird provides two options for push notifications. Choose an appropriate option upon consideration of how much support for multi-device push notifications your client app requires. Compared to this general push notification option, with Multi-Device support, push notifications are delivered to all offline devices even when a user is online on one or more devices. Refer to Understanding the differences in the Multi-Device Support page to understand the differences between two options in detail.

Feel free to head on over to the Sendbird Community if you have additional questions!