Google Cloud Platform Blog: Google App Engine takes the pain out of sending iOS push notifications

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Google App Engine takes the pain out of sending iOS push notifications

Monday, July 1, 2013

Delivering scalable, reliable mobile push notifications when hundreds of thousands of users have installed your app on their phones can be a major headache. Fortunately, Google App Engine’s support for sockets and accessible but powerful queues makes it easy to quickly build a mobile backend that can reliably scale to huge numbers of devices.

Get the code!
We’ve created a simple push notification application to help you get started in our Github repository that uses all of the techniques described below. Download or fork the source code to get started.

Your mobile application securely registers itself with Apple to be able to receive push notifications, usually when the app is being launched the first time. It receives a device token, which the mobile application passes to your mobile backend.

Your server opens a secure connection to APNS, and when an event occurs that requires a push notification - your server sends a short message including the device token of the device that should receive the message to APNS. APNS will then handle the ‘last-mile delivery’ of the notification to the device.