Urban Airship Closes Free License

Very soon - December 31, New Year. But along with this, the free Developer Edition will close in the Urban Airship Push Notification distribution system. The company offers either to buy a paid subscription, or to go to other push providers.

Let's see what options we have.



It’s very sad when a service closes a free subscription, it forces users to look for alternative options and undermines the credibility of this service. I was able to find two push notification platforms that provide automatic migration with Urban Airship.


First, consider the Pushwoosh service . Recently, a blog entry about the possibility of automaticmigration. Everything is quite simple - create an application, enter APP_ID & API_MASTER_KEY (from Arban Airship). After that, all our subscribers go to this application and after we set the settings for the platform we are interested in, you can start sending push notifications. At the same time, badges (for iOS devices) and tags are saved.

A free Pushwoosh subscription provides:

• 5 applications
• 1,000,000 devices
• Rich pages
• 2 RSS feeds
• View Push History (Analytics)

The second service, which offers the automatic migration tool Parse. Migration occurs in a similar way.
A free subscription to Parse provides:

• 1,000,000 devices
• Analytics

iOS devices in Parse for some reason did not migrate.

Both platforms provide SDKs for popular platforms (iOS, Android, ...). The issue of migrating the SDK for an application will not be covered in this post, since it depends on how quickly you can update applications for each platform (in each store).

It would be interesting in the comments to discuss the pros and cons of existing platforms for sending push notifications.