Is it possible to broadcast push notifications without services like Urban Airship?
Thanks.
Certainly, but you need to implement the entire infrastructure on your own.
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/RemoteNotificationsPG/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40008194-CH1-SW1
Edit: You're emphasizing "broadcast" in your question. Urban Airship doesn't do anything special, other than tracking every single device token that has been registered in the lifetime of the application, as well as tracking those tokens which Apple has told it to turn off. The broadcast feature is just them utilizing all that data to send a batch of pushes.
It's all doable on your own, but it's a lot of work. This is why services like Urban Airship exist.
It's easy to set up the backend using this and Rails.
Related
I need to know if its possible to make push notifications without use the APNS.
And if it can be done, what are the best options?
Web server ->pushNotification-> Device
What about the VoIP apps? --> Can we push notification without using APNs?
Thanks.
No, there is no way to use Push notification without APNS. This is restriction from Apple and is documented here
No you can not push notification to a device without using Apple's push notification service.
It is not possible to display push notifications for your application in the same way that the built in push notifications appear without using the Apple Push Notification Service.
You may be able to set up some kind of web socket-based solution, but that will not work when your app is in the background, thus defeating the point.
Check out Urban Airship
Push Composer makes sending Push Notifications simple for anyone in your organization. By putting the power of engagement into the hands of your business team, you can empower them to reach your customers quickly without adding strain on your engineering team. And because you can preview your message as you write it, you’ll know exactly how your users will see and engage with your message.
I would like to use Push Notifications for my iOS app. What is the best resource that shows on how to implement this service? Also whats tools are available so I could try a simple Push Notification.
I'd recommend Urban Airship because it is free for a certain amount of Push Notifications, and they provide a guide on getting it setup.
Does any one know what are the possible APNS providers around? I need to develop push notification and for that i need to choose one like Urban Aiship or Mono Push so i would like to have list of those providers.
Can any one help?
Please also let me know how can i send customer specific notifications.
Thanks,
Jigar
I know this isn't really a direct answer to your question, but I'd like to say that I recommend you go with Urban Airship for your push needs.
I definitely understand the desire to "comparison shop," but UA is proven and is a defacto leader in the space. With something as mission critical as push notifications, the safe money is with the biggest and most stable offering available.
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.
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