Overview of mobile push notification services

    I recently noticed that it was inconvenient for me to receive notifications from different programs by email. The term “email overload” has long been established and companies like Google are trying to work with this (they introduce folders, filters, and now tabs in Gmail).

    I liked the concept of the notification center, which successfully proved to be on the Android OS, appeared in iOS6 and is scheduled for release on Windows Phone. This is one notification feed for all services, convenient viewing, working with notifications, simple list cleaning. From my own experience I was convinced that this is many times more convenient than the usual email notifications that turn inbox into a mess.

    Since our team is simultaneously working on several projects (“builds” are flying somewhere, changes are pushing somewhere, and so on), I thought it was interesting to connect our projects to this option of notifications about events occurring in the system. Ideally, I wanted to be able to send notifications to different team members, and if necessary, to the whole team. Only I wanted to get them from the software that I work with - from the Continuous Integration tools and automatic testing, and ending directly with the error logs, statistics and critics from the projects.


    I did not consider the option of creating my own application, so in my spare time I studied the existing tools for sending custom notifications. I was interested in products with a ready-made native mobile application for receiving notifications and, of course, an API for connecting to software.

    In the course of studying the issue, I contacted the developers of the Jeapie service from Ukraine, who, on a question about the speed of their service, kindly provided me with their indicators in comparison with other services. This led me to the idea of ​​publishing this review.

    So,

    Boxcar



    Website: http://boxcar.io/
    Year of foundation: 2009 (acquired by ProcessOne in 2012)
    Platforms: iOS, Web version, Mac desktop
    Price: Client application free of charge ($ 4.99 for disabling advertising within the application)
    API restriction: 200 notifications per minute for free. At the same time, the limit is 100 Android and iOS clients subscribed to the provider. For mass mailings you will have to buy a paid subscription (tariffs from 7 euros per month)
    Ability to do newsletters: Yes
    Summary. Boxcar is a fairly old and customer-oriented service. Positions itself as an aggregator. From ready-made integrations, rather user-friendly ones, such as notifications from Twitter, Facebook, Email gateway.
    Now the service is under reconstruction. They plan to move to a model of mobile backends (such as UrbanAirship, Parse, etc.). They promise big updates to the release of iOS7.

    Prowlapp



    Website: http://www.prowlapp.com
    Year of foundation: 2009
    Platforms: iOS
    Price: $ 2.99.
    API limit: 1000 requests per hour from one IP.
    Ability to do newsletters: No
    Resume. The service is quite old and immediately slightly scares off the design. Prowl focuses more on the personal needs of developers. There have been a lot of integrations and libraries during this time of existence; there are a lot of how-to articles. GitHub alone has over 150 repositories with integrations.

    Jeapie



    Website: http://demo.jeapie.com/
    Year of foundation: 2013
    Platforms: Android, iOS, PC (Chrome Extension), Web version
    Price: Free (beta)
    Ability to do newsletters: Yes.
    API Limit: No Limit (beta)
    Summary. Quite a young project, on which a team from Ukraine is working. Now it is in the stage of open beta testing, there are no restrictions on use. It can be used both personally and for teams (there is an address and group mailing). The team is very responsive, they respond to letters quickly, actively implement features and fix bugs. Now there is already integration with GitHub (notifications at commits), they plan to move in the near future towards project management systems, bug trackers. Libraries for popular programming languages ​​and frameworks are also ready.

    Notifymyandroid



    Website: http://www.notifymyandroid.com/
    Year of foundation: 2011
    Platforms: Android
    Price: Free up to 5 notifications per day. Unlimited - $ 4.99 per client application.
    API limit: 800 requests per hour. If you need more, then you need to contact the developers.
    Ability to do newsletters: No
    Resume. There are a very large number of integrations with various programs, for example, you can send yourself notifications on Android from the Chrome extension, create Zapier recipes, and redirect notifications from Growl for Windows. The positioning is similar to Prowl, also more for individual use by a specialist. From the name it’s clear that iOS support is not planned.

    Pushover



    Website: https://pushover.net/
    Year of foundation: 2012
    Platforms: Android, iOS
    Price: Client-application for receiving notifications costs $ 4.99.
    API limit: 7500 requests per month for one application. An additional 10,000 will cost $ 50.
    Ability to do newsletters: No, although you can do it with a “crutch” method through device identifiers.
    Summary. The service is well developed for personal use, there is a flexible application configuration, you can set different priorities and even ringtones to notifications. Integrations are both with popular CMS (Wordpress, Drupal), and with a number of not very well-known services. There is a fairly large set of libraries for various programming languages ​​and frameworks.

    Of course, I liked more products that allow you to try to work for free (trial), which in my opinion is very important for such a software plan. Boxcar, Pushover, and Jeapie are best suited for my task, as they allow you to send notifications to a group of users at the same time.

    API Speed ​​Measurement Results


    The speed of delivery of notifications to the device is difficult to calculate, since it is tied to the GCM / APNS server, but you can measure the response speed of the API.

    For the test, VPS servers were used - St. Petersburg, USA, Germany.

    Boxcar
    Link: boxcar.io/devices/providers/{API_KEY►/notifications
    Result:


    Prowlapp
    Link: api.prowlapp.com/publicapi/add
    Result:


    Jeapie
    Link: api.jeapie.com/v2/personal/send/message.json
    Result:


    NotifyMyAndroid
    Link: notifymyandroid.com/publicapi/notify
    Result:
    image

    Pushover
    Link: api.pushover.net/1/messages.json
    Result:


    The reason for such a Jeapie speed for Russia is the geographical location (to a greater extent) + Node.js

    For myself, I decided to set up such notifications for Jenkins CI so far in order to receive notification of the status of builds, including and more beautiful.
    It is most pleasant to use Jeapie and Pushover, let's see how they show themselves in combat conditions.

    UPDATE: Jeapie
    guys are now concentrating on a new product - SDK for increasing user retention in mobile applications (via push notifications, in-app messages and analytics).
    And the application for receiving notifications has moved to demo.jeapie.com

    Also popular now: