push notification

Xtify has created a Push Notification Service for Android - allowing developers to push messages directly to their audience.

Messages can be sent using our webservice and can also be configured using our Campaign Manager tool.

The Xtify platform also allows you to geo-trigger notifications - you can set messaging rules based on a user's proximity to particular locations.

Check out Xtify Developer: Home to learn more about our service and SDK

Thanks!
Josh

I'm wondering why everyone is so concerned about "push" notification? If you get an email, are you really going to drop everything your doing at that instant to read it? Polling every hour works for 99% of people just fine, so its really a non issue IMO

IOWA said:

I'm wondering why everyone is so concerned about "push" notification? If you get an email, are you really going to drop everything your doing at that instant to read it? Polling every hour works for 99% of people just fine, so its really a non issue IMO

Click to expand...

That's not really the point. The point is that the process is very inefficient since the device has to establish a data connection, check for new items, and disconnect. And, it does that however many times you have set to your polling interval.

With push notification, the device doesn't do anything until the server notifies it. That's better for resource utilization and battery life. And, I think 99% of people are in favor of that.

Gmail on the Android doesn't necessarily have to be push, because it could just be using the IMAP IDLE command (the inventor of IMAP explains the difference between the two here). It probably is push because calendar, contacts, and gTalk are all delivered in real-time. To answer the OP's question, no there isn't a push notification server for Android right now, but hopefully Google sees this as a worthwhile feature and adds it.

Hi All-

I'm going to start a separate thread to announce this, but I figured I'd add a post to this discussion as well, since there has been some mention of the availability of a push system for app developers...

I've just created a new open-source project to create a comet-style push notifications library for Android. The goal is to build a client for the Meteor push server (Meteor), using Meteor as a developer-operated backend to deliver push notifications to Android apps.

There is more information about the project at "Deacon"

We need Java-savvy developers, so if you'd like to contribute it will be much appreciated! (And, you can get in on the ground floor of a project that could end up being used very widely in the Android world!)

Cheers,
Dave

Hi!

I'm a Java/J2EE developer, but since a week I "became" an Android developer, while our company needs to develop an application for Android. The application is "Find my Droid", is must be a release like apple has for iPhone : Apple - MobileMe - Find your iPhone or iPad..
So the main problem and also my question is : does Android has a central push server? like iPhone does (iPhone Push Notification Server). Because our server needs to push notification message to Android, when somebody wants to find their phone, so I guess I have to develop an application which is connected continuously to a server. Please share your opinion, and tell me if there is a PUSH SERVER (for ANDROID ; for FREE). I know there is one from Ericsson : https://labs.ericsson.com/apis/mobile-push, and another : Xtify Developer: Home. But I want to know if there is a special one for Android.

Thank You very much

Maybe I'm over simplifying this in my head but can't any Android app open a connection to a server and listen and create notifications when data is received? Isn't this essentially what an IM app does? I'm assuming the big deal with Apple's push notifications is that the OS itself does the listening for all of the apps. And that was because the apps couldn't stay alive to listen for themselves. Android didn't have this problem. Now sure you'll have a bunch of apps in the background listening but now with Apple allowing developers to push through their own servers wouldn't they have a connection for each app as well?

It just seems like one of those cases where company/platform A has some limitation and when they fix it they market it like its an innovation rather than a fix. Users of company/platform B here about it and want the same thing not knowing their platform never had that limitation.

Again maybe I'm over simplifying but outside of having a central listening mechanism in the OS I don't see where push notifications can't be done in Android as is. As for mail thats a limitation on the protocols and servers used to handle the email and I don't understand why push hasn't been widely adopted inside email protocols outside of Microsoft.

I was doing some testing and it seems to be PUSH to me. Sent an email from my work account to my Gmail, and it appeared on the phone within 30 sec (as well on my open GMail client in Chrome).

Setup my 1&1 email accounts to forward to my Gmail, and then waited a few minutes for the changes to take effect on their end. Then sent an email from my work account to my 1&1 email addresses, and again got the notifications on the phone within 30 sec or so.

Now, before I changed my 1&1 accounts to forward to my Gmail, I had them setup as POP accounts through Gmail. My phone would get the email, but it seemed to be at the whim of when Google's servers would check my 1&1 accounts over POP (which could be up to an hour).

Skimmed through this thread a bit so apologies if I repeat anyone too much.

As stated Gmail and some other features (calendar, voice, etc.) are indeed push-based. Some older versions of the software may be using pulling though (e.g., Google Voice used interval pulling until the most recent update), so that's something to look at if you are having issues. I see a ~5 second delay between sending an email from one account and seeing it in a separate account on my phone.

Apple's service works in the way you would pretty much expect, i.e., in an extremely limited and controlled way. An application registers itself against a developer's database. That developer's servers or the application itself can determine when a push should happen. If this happens on the servers (e.g., breaking news), those servers communicate push tokens, application IDs, message, badge, sound, action, etc. to Apple's servers. Apple's servers then communicate to the iPhone (or attempt to). The total payload is limited to 256-bytes, so you can't send anything significant in this manner. Since it all goes through Apple's servers you can't (well, shouldn't) send anything confidential either. Each iPhone keeps a socket opened with the push notification servers all the time. Since all the notifications are funneled through this single service, it can be more battery efficient.

One major problem is that you can't cause the app to do something in the background. For instance, a third-party mail app cannot see the push if it is not opened, so you can't have it download an email in the background. Instead, the user gets an amazingly obtrusive notification on top of the current activity and has the option to open the app. In this regard, it is worse than the pull methods incorporated by many Android applications. You couldn't ever use Apple's push notification servers to keep an offline sync of RSS feeds, for instance. Apple's push servers also receive the "don't send me more push notifications from X app" requests and the developer's servers have to constantly grab that data and update their databases or risk being blocked from the service.

The certificates used on the developer's service also have to match or Apple's servers instantly drop the connection with no error message. They can also drop the connection for no apparent reason, and they also have to way to guarantee or verify delivery.

Hopefully that clarifies some and answers a few of the questions. If you can't tell, I've had to do a lot of work with push notifications lately, and it wasn't fun.

^^^ Then that pretty much confirms what I thought. There is no limitation that I can see stopping anyone from developing push notifications for their application on Android. Its just a matter of people asking for a feature simply because it was publicized on another platform when it was really not a feature but a fix for a shortcoming.

Now the only benefit of Apple's system may be that you only have one application doing the listening vs potentially many apps with sockets open. I don't do alot of network programming so I'm not sure how that affects battery life. But it seems to me that if the application has a thread that blocks and waits for data then it shouldn't be using cpu cycles and draining the battery right? It would only take up memory. And with Apple now allowing 3rd party multitasking there would be no difference. So unless there is a resource cost per connection for open connections in the background (and there may be thinking about how e-buddy chews on my battery lol) then theres not much of a point for a baked in push system for Android that I can see.

Are there any android apps besides the google ones that actually provide push notification?

This seems like a no-brainer feature I would include if I were a developer (unless it's really hard to implement) ... especially for apps for twitter/facebook, sports scores, breaking news, etc. Every app I've tried so far only pull down updates at certain intervals.

I seem to be able to get push notifications. However, when the phone sleeps, it gets disconnected from the wifi. I only get it when I wake the phone up, then it connects to the wifi.
Is there an option or an app that can wake the phone periodically?
After all, most of the time Im either in the office or at home that has wifi, so I dont use data connection in these areas.

mcta said:

I seem to be able to get push notifications. However, when the phone sleeps, it gets disconnected from the wifi. I only get it when I wake the phone up, then it connects to the wifi.
Is there an option or an app that can wake the phone periodically?
After all, most of the time Im either in the office or at home that has wifi, so I dont use data connection in these areas.

Click to expand...

Just go to your wifi settings, press menu, advanced, and change the wifi sleep policy.

Wolf11 said:

Just go to your wifi settings, press menu, advanced, and change the wifi sleep policy.

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what the..... still need to press menu in there?!?!? Y cant it just be plain sight.... anyway, thx its a great help

Or do this:

Under Settings/"Accounts and sync," reate a new mail account.

Choose "Corporate" for the type.

Enter the e-mail address and password for the Gmail account you're setting up.

Press Next.

Wait for "Retrieving account information" to complete.

You may need to make some changes on the page that appears. Don't be afraid to override the defaults that your Android suggests:

For "Domain/Username," enter your full Gmail address; i.e., name@gmail.com.

For the "Express sever," enter m.google.com.

Touch Next and wait for the "Retrieving account information" to complete again.

From there on, it's just a matter of following the simple prompts.

You can get true push email for Yahoo. Simply use the official Yahoo Mail app from the Android Market and make sure you got sync on.

Facebook now pushes messages with the latest app revision.

Twitter apps pull messages with the sole exception of Twitter for Android which pushes mentions and direct mentions.

Various news apps also push news. A good one is the CBS News for Android app.

eBay app also pushes notifications. It appears so does a number of stock apps, like eTrade.

Mobiata's Flighttracker also pushes notifications for any change flight or flight status.

I use an app called Earthquake! that pushes notifications if an earthquake happens.

Thread seems to be missing this but, of course, ActiveSync is push.

mcta said:

what the..... still need to press menu in there?!?!? Y cant it just be plain sight.... anyway, thx its a great help

Click to expand...

Because it's an advanced setting. Typical users won't need to change it.

Guamguy said:

You can get true push email for Yahoo. Simply use the official Yahoo Mail app from the Android Market and make sure you got sync on.

Click to expand...

Or configure it as an IMAP account in any email app that supports it. The settings are out there. I don't have them off the top of my head as I don't have a Yahoo account. My SO does and uses K9.

takeshi said:

Thread seems to be missing this but, of course, ActiveSync is push.


Because it's an advanced setting. Typical users won't need to change it.

Click to expand...

Well.... you wont be able to get any notifications without some sort of data connection. Especially when one (like me that only relies on wifi) don't use mobile data connection (eg. 3g), wifi needs to be always enabled to get email notifications without turning on the phone.

I am new to android push. Want to know the limit for number of pushes to a particular device. How can I increase this limit? If the limit exceeded, after how long I will be able to send again?

I integrated push notification for my android app,I need push notification on/off facility to that app,Can any one please help me...