Firebase Notifications is a free service that enables targeted user notifications for mobile app developers. It is based on Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), and provides an option if you need a flexible notification platform that requires minimal effort to get started. It includes a graphical console for sending messages, so no programming is needed when picking your target segment and creating the message they’ll receive.

We’ve now expanded the way that you can target your notifications. With the first release of Firebase Notifications, we provided the facility for you to target users in a particular app, optionally filtering on Firebase Analytics Audience membership, language, or specific app version. Today we’re releasing a new set of enhancements to the Firebase Notifications console that will allow you to select a much more granular audience to receive your notification — and as you know, accurately targeted notifications give a far greater chance of user engagement.

First of all, the user audience filter has more granular control. Now, if you choose to filter on  User Audience, you’ll see a set of tools that let you flexibly target users by their membership in multiple different audiences.

This allows you to target or exclude users who  are members of a particular set of audiences. . Using a combination of several targeting criteria, as well as user-defined audiences, you have great control over which users will  receive your notification.

Also new is the facility to filter your desired target segment based on user property. Firebase User Properties are attributes that allow you to define segments of your user base, beyond the typical app level properties. So, for example, if you’re building a fitness app, and you want to track how many people have met their fitness goals, you could define a user property for that, and then send notifications to them accordingly.

Now, you can target a notification by selecting a user property to compare against a desired value. So, if the user property contains a string, you can check if it contains, does not contain, is in, or is not in a range of values, or you can target users with user properties that match a Regex using RE2 syntax.

And of course if the user property contains a numeric value, there are several operators that you can use to compare it to a value — such as equals, greater than, less than and more.

With these tools you’re equipped to more accurately target your notifications, to improve response rates while avoiding notification spam. We’re continuing to improve all of Firebase, including Firebase Notifications, and would love to hear your feedback on this or any other features.

To learn more, check out the Firebase Notifications documentation site.