Amazon Launches Developer Friendly SNS Push Messaging Service

Push messaging is a must have for any app that depends upon user engagement for their success. Unfortunately, from a technical standpoint push messaging systems are a pain for mobile developers to integrate, maintain and update.

Deploying a cross-platform push messaging solution is an issue that has remained a complex and time-consuming for the Android and iPhone app developer community. Each popular mobile platform maintains a different free relay service that delivers notifications through persistent connections to devices running the platforms they own.

E-commerce giant Amazon.com has responded to this problem with the launch of their new SNS mobile push service. Amazon Web Services is a division of the company that provides a plethora of web and mobile development tools, some of which we use on a daily basis at DogTown.

According to the company’s press release, “The new cross-platform notification service is a fast, scalable and cost-effective way for mobile apps to proactively keep their users aware of critical events and relevant information. Many customers tell us they build and maintain their own mobile push services, even though they find this approach expensive, complex and error-prone… 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.”

As an iPhone app developer in San Francisco this is a welcome addition to AWS’s arsenal of developer tools. The SNS messaging platform is a long overdue and will save countless dev hours for our team. I look forward to giving it a whirl.