Does anyone have an recommendations for an apple push notification service?
I need to send a bunch of time sensitive transactional push notifications. I’m looking for a service that we if we send 10k + push notifications that they can get delivered in within seconds.
Urban Airship seems to be the standard, but it’s fairly expensive at scale.
I really like ZeroPush. They have a nice API, they have implemented API fixes and updates very quickly on request for me in the past, and I’ve never experienced any technical issues. They are also not expensive.
The only downside with them is that they don’t do Android. (We ended up using UrbanAirship on my company’s app recently solely for that reason.) Some friends of mine who are doing a Rails app that pushes to Android and iOS have been using Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), which is really cheap, but definitely more complicated to initially implement than Urban Airship.
UA is removing their free tier. I share your worries about their pricing. I’ve also found their reporting is fairly awful.
I would NOT under any circumstances try to do this yourself. The Rails libraries like Houston, APNS on Rails, etc. are all vulnerable to Apple’s annoying socket-termination behavior, which makes it very difficult to know what messages in a batch got properly delivered. If you do go ahead with a service like ZeroPush or UA, make sure you build out your push mechanism with a layer of abstraction so that you can swap in another service in the future.
Curious what experiences other folks have had with other services, particularly with Amazon if anyone’s used it.
We’ve been super happy with ZeroPush. Smaller company, run by a couple of smart folks. Might be worth talking to them. Alternatively, you could look into Amazon’s offering, although I’ve never used it personally and it might require more custom code.
@Nicolo I recommend you contact ZeroPush directly to discuss whether they can handle the volume you’ll have.