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Amazon has added a new service to its Amazon Web Services division that should make it easier for developers to integrate push notifications into their apps, particularly when developing for multiple platforms.
SNS Mobile Push allows developers to send notifications to iOS, Android and Kindle Fire devices for $1 per million notifications sent, without developing a complicated push notification backend and with Amazon's backing as apps scale to millions of users.
Supporting push notifications at large scale has been incredibly complicated for mobile app developers. Each popular mobile platform maintains a different free relay service that delivers notifications through persistent connections to devices running the platforms they own. This means that to support millions of users on multiple mobile platforms, developers must integrate with each of these platform-specific relay services, which introduces operational complexity and cost. In addition, the nature of mobile app distribution is such that successful apps can become popular almost overnight, exacerbating these challenges for customers.
“Many customers tell us they build and maintain their own mobile push services, even though they find this approach expensive, complex and error-prone,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President of Database Services, AWS. “Amazon SNS with Mobile Push takes these concerns off the table with one simple cross-platform API, a flat low price and a free tier that means many customers won’t pay anything until their applications achieve scale.”
Smaller developers can integrate the service as well, with Amazon allowing developers to send one million notifications per month for free.
To learn more about Amazon SNS Mobile Push, visit: http://aws.amazon.com/sns.
Top Rated Comments
Sending the notifications may be free, but one still has to pay for the servers that send the notifications. This service provides that infrastructure for you.
Oh, you're right. Most companies have servers, but for the small developers who don't have servers, Amazon is providing the SERVERS to send the notifications. That's something that might help small developers.
Plus, using Google, Apple and Kindle notifications are all free.
Sending the notifications may be free, but one still has to pay for the servers that send the notifications. This service provides that infrastructure for you.
Maybe I don't get it, but if the US has 254M people, would it cost me $254 to spam everyone?
Only if you could get everyone to download your app.
Windows Azure just announced a similar feature yesterday that provides cross platform notifications for Windows Store (WNS), Windows Phone (MPNS), iOS (APNS), and Android (GCM). All good stuff!
I don't see how this is a big deal. There are only 3 places to send notifications now. When there are hundreds, it would be a big deal. But if there were hundreds, there would also be hundreds of versions of a developer's software to create.
There's a lot of complexity in handling push notifications well. For example, I'd be willing to bet that most iOS devs don't bother checking the APNS feedback queue for bad tokens/etc.Plus, using Google, Apple and Kindle notifications are all free. This has a nominal fee, but would still create another bill to pay for a corporation. And trying to get that paperwork through for a new recurring fee would be a nightmare, that most developers would skip it and go the free route.
I'm a developer, and I don't get the need for this. I guess the good parts would be (a) only one interface to learn, not three. (b) Amazon is trying to create a notification 'standard'
The benefit is that you don't have to write and maintain that code. It should be worth it even if you're only supporting a single platform.