Push Notifications to Mobile Devices Using Amazon SNS | Hacker News Reader

Push Notifications to Mobile Devices Using Amazon SNS

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110 pointsjeffbarr34 comments

For those who want to setup a similar service on their own server: http://github.com/uniqush/uniqush-push It is free and open source, written in Go and It can run on most major platform.

This seems like an awesome project! Correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't support Kindles yet, right? Only Android and iOS?

Well. Considering kindle does not support GCM, no, uniqush does not support kindle. But there's some work around: there's another piece of program which maintains long term TCP connections: http://github.com/uniqush/uniqush-conn

However, uniqush-conn is still under construction (more precisely, the server side program is almost there, but the client library is still under construction.) The whole picture of the system is described here: http://blog.uniqush.org/uniqush-after-go1.html

I haven't heard that amazon has any free public service for push notification for kindle, like GCM or APNS. If there exist one, I will definitely add support to uniqush-push. Otherwise, a long term TCP connection may be the only choice for uniqush.

Supporting Windows Phone would be a trivial job. But I do not have a Windows device to work with, the support for windows has to be delayed.

Well. It seems that kindle does provide some cloud service for push notification [1]. Then I will add this support in recent release

1. https://developer.amazon.com/sdk/adm/concepts.html

does is cost cheaper to run this on a dedicated box (e.g medium instance) instead of using Amazon's sns ?

I had previously implemented push notifications manually but the challenge is sending a lot of messages when you have over 1M devices.

This is significantly cheaper than Urban Airship, which charges $0.50 to send 500 messages. Amazon will deliver between 500k and 1M for the same money. That's at least one good reason to use the service.

.50c ? that's crazy for that kind of service, especially when Apple is actually doing the delivery.

plus apple doesn't guarantee the delivery as well

Push notification services never guarantee delivery.

Usually the service adds bells and whistles like geo-location targeting, segmentation, scheduled delivery, and other things.

Urban Airship seems to be targeting larger customers these days though, and their pricing reflects it.

That's only the pricing for small-time users.

well, they do give a million free push messages a month to start with which slightly skews it.

"1 Million FREE Push messages/month. $0.001 per additional Push message"[1]

[1] https://go.urbanairship.com/accounts/register/

It's when I need to send 2M a month that there will be problems.

Anybody know what the comparable Azure service costs?

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/notificati...

Interesting new addition from AWS. Directly competing with some features from Urban Airship or Parse. I will have to dig into the code/library they provide since right now for a cross platform app of mine I used my own server (+DB) for iOS, and Parse for Android, but was getting ready to switch iOS on Parse.

One of the main thing that bug me with Parse -and I believe it is still the same: they implemented their own Android service to watch for notification coming in, when I will prefer to have my app use the local native notification system... More work for them since it require different integration on Android and Device like Kindle Fire, but better from a user point of view.

Anyway competitions in that space is good

It is also interesting as Parse is being featured as one of the AWS prominent customers in the past, but now AWS compete directly with them.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/parse/

Looks like Azure introduced their own version the same day. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/08/12/windows-az...

Azure had this implemented and available a while ago actually. The "General Availability Release" happened 5 days ago.

is 5 days really "a while"..

I'm always quite nervous submitting apps to the Apple app store using 3rd party notification services. Have used both Parse and Urban Airship in the past, given Apple's brash attitude or the fact that either services potentially could shut down due to any unforeseen circumstances. I wonder if this could be a viable alternative given their branding and reach. Using APNS is quite straight forward until you start worrying about what may be getting monitored / violating the TOS

Interesting that they compare push notifications to SMS. While the delivery experience may be close (text popping up on screen), the ubiquitous addressability of SMS is still lacking. If only Apple and Google offered an app-independent way to address devices, that would reduce friction and probably end SMS as we know it, or case SMS prices to fall to bandwidth cost-levels.

It's beyond me why Apple hasn't leveraged iMessage in this regard.

They have no financial reason to do so. Amazon is motivated by its developer customers to provide a platform to empower them across as many end user devices as possible.

Excellent point. But it would screw (even further) with their carrier relations. The carriers hate iMessage and push notifications as it is.

Good point, but at the current adoption levels of both Android and iOS, carrier backlash is almost irrelevant, especially in US.

Windows phone has the app independent way of doing messaging in their messaging hub. Quite useful.

I wonder how long till AWS provides some form of realtime websocket/whatever connection service. (I admit it will be some time before things are stable enough to make it sensible for AWS to get involved).

This marks as interesting expansion nonetheless. Probably need to work out what extra cost of this is like (pretty hard to compare though)

It seems fairly limited right now, and doesn't do much to alleviate the pain of supporting many different push notification services.

You still have to code the client side pieces for each platform separately instead of providing a uniform SDK, you then communicate the notification URIs "somehow" to your own backend and store them on your own. The only difference seems to be that you would then talk to Amazon's API instead of directly to for example Google Cloud Messaging from your backend. I'm not sure it's worth introducing an abstraction layer just for this slim piece. Hopefully they'll broaden scope later on.

WNS & MPNS support for Windows 8 / WP8 notifications also appears to be missing.

For what it's worth, the new Azure Notification Hubs[1] present a fairly uniform API across devices.

[1] http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/not...

This is just abstracting the process of sending a notification to the different backends - which is fairly significant. Apple, for one, requires you to hold open a TCP connection to them, they don't provide a REST-ish sort of interface for sending notifications.

The client-side piece is still a bit messy, but that's not where AWS plays anyway.

Is there is good service that will let me send notifications via Amazon SNS to simple SMS (outside the U.S)?

I'm using https://pushover.net/

Easy to integrate and all you really need to pay is the iPhone App.

it is not a direct competition to urban airship or parse, we will still need to use GCM or Apple Push notification, all amazon is solving is to make the backend storing of the Unique push tokens simple and taking care of sending push notifications with queue etc.

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