I want to use Retool as a backend admin panel and I wish to develop the app using ReactNative.
Is it possible to do? How would I use APIs for Mobile and how would I be able to send Push Notifications?
Hello @nimblechapps!
Interesting use case. From my experience, a common architecture pattern is to use Retool as a frontend admin panel 
Given that resources and queries can manipulate data in a user's databases, it does have potential to work as a backend layer handling requests that come in from a mobile app 
The only way for Retool to accept incoming network traffic would be via an exposed endpoint, which you could create in a workflow as the trigger. Be careful as these endpoints will be exposed to the open internet and there could be security concerns for how much traffic comes in, malicious actors and the types of payloads that come in.
Workflows can be used to trigger responses that your app's frontend could receive and thus trigger Push Notifications.
I would also suggest looking into our Mobile app to see if we have the functionality to build the frontend components you would needs, as it could be much faster than building a ReactNative app from scratch!
Thank you @Jack_T
Figured. So we have decided to still use Retool for Admin Frontend (as you suggested 
) and we will be using the external database so that the endpoints for Mobile could be created on some backend tech like Python or Node or something. As for the Notifications now that we are having the external db we will be managing that through Firebase or something.
One more thing I forgot to ask... Is there a way to trigger any Firebase Action or notifications to my external Firebase account on any admin action? Basically for things like admin approving the account we want to notify that to user.
Scenario: The user signs up with all his details and his profile is awaiting approval. In the background this is what we need: 1) Admin to get notified somehow (how do we do that within Retool (like Web Push or something)?
2) When admin approves (our admin is using Retool as mentioned) the user account the user gets notified that your account has been approved.
Do you have any clue if anything like this could be achieved using any 3rd party integration with Retool? Firebase?
Here are our docs on Firebase queries. We definitely have a lot of options for Firebase actions you can trigger from Retool!
You can also trigger emails with a SMTP resource to alert users for approvals and other events.
I do not think we have mobile push or web push notifications but there might be a third party library you can improve to do those. Definitely check out our workflows docs as you can use workflows to automate actions based on events which occur in a Retool app and python libraries can do lots of cool stuff!
What you are asking for is definitely possible, will just take some building and testing!