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Introduction

Push Notifications are ways to inform users for application development to propagate information to iOS devices. Firebase is one of the most common services to deal with push notifications in Flutter.

Apple Push Notification Service (APNS)

APNS is the official Apple service to deliver push notifications for iOS devices when the application is in foreground, background or app killed state. For sending push notifications to iOS users, you can either communicate with APNS using the certificate or using an authentication token signing key. It is always a great idea to create and upload the authentication key for a number of reasons:

1. You can use the same APNS key for multiple applications.

2. You can use one signing key to distribute notifications for all of your company’s applications.

3. The signing key works for both development and production environments.

4. The signing key doesn’t expire unlike the push certificates which needs to be regenerated every year.

5. Token-based authentication offers a stateless way to communicate with APNS. Stateless communication is faster than certificate-based communication.

How do push notifications work?

These notifications are either generated by the application locally or remotely from your server. The application generated notifications are often triggered by specific events like time or location.