I'm looking into push notifications for an app I'm creating. I've heard lots about UrbanAirship but I can't seem to find a definitive reason why I should use it? As far as I understand it UA is a middle man? This page shows the free version doesn't have a push composer, so a developer will still need a server themselves to create the notification, if their own server is needed then I might as well go directly to APNS?
What is the point and advantage of UA? And if you use it how do you send notifications without your own server?
A working implementation of push notifications involves many things, such as:
Keeping track of Device IDs (web service for the device to contact, database to store the IDs)
Storing metadata associated with each Device ID (ie. so you can refer to a device by a username or a group of devices by a tag)
Keeping track of which devices have been deactivated (which happens if the user turns of notifications)
Clearing out bad Device IDs
Actually forming the raw request to send the message to Apple's servers
Some sort of service/program to know when you need to send the notifications
Urban Airship takes care of 1-5 for you, which greatly simplifies the whole process. Yes, you if were just sending a message to one device, you could probably find a C# or python or Objective-C library to connect to Apple and form the message but as soon as you need to keep track of a large number of devices, Urban Airship provides a service for free (if under 1 million pushes a month) to take a lot of work off your shoulders.
(And this is just for the basic push service for iPhone, as this is the only service I have used)
To answer your other question, you do still need some 'server' or program to know when to push (#6). I, for example, monitor twitter with a python program for keywords and send out notifications when I see those. My program is not concerned with the details of how to send notifications, the Urban Airship library I use takes care of the interaction with Urban Airship and Apple.
If you start your free trial at nextdns, you find urbanairship becomes one of the most common offenders that they block.
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I want to create an application which will be notified by server for new events. (lets say I have a shop and I need to inform all my iPhone users for my sales or something like this) Users who will download my application and run it and then put it in background wil have to be notified by this. Im quite new to iOS and Objective-C but if im not wrong this could be done via apple push notifications. Ive been reading about this and found out there are some providers that let you send this notifications. My question is, are there ways to create your own notification "center" in lets say c# and send notifications to iPhone-s by yourself, also if this could not be done are there any free providers?
and another thing. In objective-c app you have to subscribe your app to listen to that kind of events. Could you create app in phonegap or some other technologies so it will work with notifications? could you lets say embeed your app in objective-c (like web app in objective-c)
For sure you can do your own C# program that will push APNs to your clients (in fact I did that myself in many apps). What you have to understand is that the architecture of APN has 2 critical facts:
APNs are best effort, so no guarantee that they will reach every time.
APNs can not hold a lot of information with them when they reach your client (they have a limited number of bits, refer to the Apple documentation).
Due to these facts you might need to have your own server application (also could be in C#) that will handle sending the real information to the clients and will make sure that the data reached your client as well. Needless to say, this server application should sit and run on a real server. Maybe due to this fact some developers start looking for a third party solution, but personally I prefer not to use a third party and I do everything myself.
Other than having your own server application, your iPhone app will need to have some sort of database (probably SQLite3) to store the received news and display them later on.
EDIT: Answer of your questions in the comments below:
For the first question "why iPhone app must have sql db". In fact it is not a must, as I said in my answer above, it is probable or a possibility. To know if you will need a database or not this depends on the nature of your app itself. For example you might be pushing text and images to your clients and in that case you can not fit such data in the payload of the APN. Another possibility, you might want not to lose the sent notification even if the user discarded the APN message, you might want to show it again when he opens the app later on... So the nature of the app decides whether you will need a server or not.
For the second question "you said you dont need to send notification via third party", let me clarify something in my answer. As an Apple developer I don't consider Apple servers as third party. Put differently, the real APN will only be sent via Apple servers and we can not change this fact (nor do we want to change it too). So at the end of the day the real APN will be sent to Apple servers and Apple servers will work on delivering it to the actual client. What I consider a third party is someone that has his own server, you send the message you want to him, and then he sends it to Apple servers. In that case there is someone between you and the Appl APN servers and this is what I called a third party, and this third party can be avoided as your C# code can directly connect to the Apple APN servers and ask it to send the message to the client. I hope I clarified my point.
Yes, you can use APNS with the phonegap application: Receiving push notification on PhoneGap for iOS
Regarding the server, there is another option for you besides doing everything from scratch. You can use the third-party server via API, seems that pushwoosh (http://pushwoosh.com) guys offer this option (and they provide phonegap integration as well)
I was wondering how games like Draw Something are sending the images to another iPhone/Android?
I want to be able to send a recorded sound/UIImage to another phone, how are they sent and received?
I'm relatively new to communication using iPhone.
I've googled and searched stackoverflow, but couldn't find anything.. maybe I'm not searching for the right query..
Thanks in advance!
They are sent via TCP/IP to a central server, or more likely, a group of servers. Those servers are responsible for storing the data and generating push notifications so the target device knows that new data is available. The target device downloads it from the central server(s), not directly from the other device.
On iOS, you can use the NSURLConnection class to push data to a server or read it back. The server is something you are also responsible for, although there are some third-party ones that you could use, like Urban Airship, to help with push notifications.
i m making an application where data is accesed from website and displayed with an application.i have made an action which will tell the user that new data has arrived.this will work properly if the application is open .but if the application is closed than ,is there any way to tell the user that new data has arrived ,,so that he can open the application and check the data?
If you are using the Apple Push Notification Service (APNs), your messages will be delivered whether the application is running or not. For information on how to control what information is presented to the user, read the Apple Push Notification Programming Guide.
You should use Apple Push Notification Service, like codelark said.
I would recommend looking into Urban Airship for help getting started. It's a third party service, but it makes things much easier. Urban Airship does have their own tutorials and code samples which may be easier than Apple's.
As a follow up to the reference to apple push notification, as of ios4.0 I believe you, you may have a few more options, 1) you can send local notifications (just like push notifications, but they originate from inside your app) that could be timed to be delivered even if the app is not running..assuming you know approximately how long it will take for data to arrive. 2) if your data update will occur soon after the app closed.. your app can request a certain amount of time to complete an operation (even though the user has closed the app) and wait for the data, then send a local notification to tell the person to come back into the app. 3) if your functions based on gps updates, music streaming, or voip you can set a flag so your app continues to run in the background
sorry for the unstructuredness of the answer, this was just off the top of my head, hope it helps
I'm new to iPhone programming. So far I've only written a couple of simple apps just to get the hang of it. In a short time I will have an assignment to write an app that will let iPhone users communicate directly using short messages, and probably they will add a requirement to be able to send files to each other attached to the messages. Of course this sounds a lot like a mail client. For several reasons the client does not want to use mail, if possible, and attaching files would leave SMS messaging out. I've been reading Apple's documentation on local, push and broadcast notifications. Would any of these be the way to go?
Thanks
User bonjour if you are one the same network: http://www.mobileorchard.com/tutorial-networking-and-bonjour-on-iphone/. Otherwise it sounds like you want to use Push. I'd recommend checking out Urban Airship
I'm doing research for making a chat based app for the iPhone (it's not really text chat in the regular sense, but the principles are the same).
Maximum 6 people can be logged into the same chat room at any one time, and the most basic question is how to efficiently check for new messages?
Would I need to simply poll the server periodically? Or is there a way I could trigger an event on the phone from the server whenever there is some new content to pay attention to?
If having to poll all the time, I worry about the resulting lag as each participant will have to wait longer for others before they can post their own responses to others. And, potentially it might also be too much to handle for the server to respond to lots of requests all the time. It would also waste bandwidth, which is not free for the user...
Unfortunately I will not be able to set up a socket server for this app, it has to be based around a regular LAMP configuration.
I think you can either go with push notifications, or XMPP (Jabber) server.
XMPP will allow your iphone app to receive data even when in the background using the new multitasking features (listening for a socket), and i'm pretty sure you should find ready to use servers for LAMP (or at least open source implementations).
Note that the iOS4 multitasking API doesn't support polling in the background, so your only other option should be push notifications. If you're new to push notifications, you can maybe use a service like Urban Airship that might make the process easier.
XMPP sounds good for you idea, i think this is the best technology for Chat. It alos works great in iOS apps.
Maybe this code sample will be helpful to start using XMPP in iOS app - look at this QuickBlox Chat code sample. It demonstrates how to integrate 1-1 Chat, Chat in room into your android application. Also there is guide how it works. I think there will be no problem to integrate it into your application. Otherwise - Comments system below allows to ask any question you want and get fast answer.
Also there is Demo video http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SncQaJBBW_0 how this Chat works.
In my opinion the best solution is socket, but you say that you can't implement the server side for this.
You could also implement it with push notifications. You can receive the push also when your app is running and send all the data you need inside the push. Usually chat messages are short...
If you don't want to mess with push notifications on the server then the only thing left, as long as I know, is the polling.