What to use for analogue FriendAround?

Question

Android

I am a beginner developer and only for android. Let's say you want to make the simplest analogue of a friend around. At least city broadcasts. Are there any basic services on the Internet to which you can attach an application and get such a live public chat? Or do you need to fully code your backend? If they exist, are there any free ones and to what load does the free service apply, and after what load do they require payment for the service?

Answer 1

Freshly released Firebase products have this capability. There is both authorization and cloud storage (in which you can store the essence of messages from a chat, for example). The only downside is that the logic is transferred to the client, and this is not safe. The upside is that it's fast and has large enough quotas for free use.

Answer 2

Yes, there are saas solutions for this matter. For example, comet-server.ru , in fact, is a backend with which you can maintain a connection via a websocket. On general terms, there are up to 20 people online for free.
But as the developer of this service, I will say that so far it is mainly used for web chats. But nothing prevents you from using it on android. For a long time I want someone to start using my service for android, so to speak, so that there is an example of successful integration that I could tell new customers about. Therefore, I suggest that if 20 people online are not enough for you, then we can agree on individual working conditions at a discount up to the cost of renting servers, depending on what we agree on.
Contacts in profiles or write to technical support comet-server.ru