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Amazon aims to unify push notifications across app platforms with SNS service

Darren Murph
Updated ·7 min read
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Calling all app developers: Amazon just launched a new tool that you'll no doubt want to take a peek at. The company's Web Services (AWS) division has just introduced Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) with Mobile Push, which is described as a "fully managed, cross-platform push notification service in the cloud." The real kicker, of course, is this nugget: "With one simple API, application developers can easily send notifications to Apple iOS, Google Android and Kindle Fire devices." Amazon's allowing all AWS customers to use the service for free so long as the reach remains under one million users, but even if you exceed that, you'll only be asked to pay $1 for each additional million.

Devs who have historically had to build and maintain different push architectures for separate platforms will likely fawn over such a universal approach, and while it's certainly not the first of its kind, it's the first to be backed by a stalwart such as Amazon. Hit up the outfit's SNS portal to get started, but please, don't take this as a green flag to up your spamming efforts -- we all know how that turned out for Farmville.

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Amazon Web Services Makes Mobile App Development Easier with Amazon SNS Mobile Push

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

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 13, 2013-- Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) with Mobile Push, a fast, fully managed, cross-platform push notification service in the cloud. With one simple API, application developers can easily send notifications to Apple iOS, Google Android and Kindle Fire devices. All AWS customers can begin using Mobile Push for Amazon SNS at no charge and send up to one million notifications each month for free. After that, customers pay $.50 for every million messages published, and $.50 for every million messages delivered ($1.00 total per million push notifications). To learn more about Amazon SNS Mobile Push, visit: http://aws.amazon.com/sns.

Supporting push notifications at large scale has been incredibly complicated for mobile app developers. Each popular mobile platform maintains a different free relay service that delivers notifications through persistent connections to devices running the platforms they own. This means that to support millions of users on multiple mobile platforms, developers must integrate with each of these platform-specific relay services, which introduces operational complexity and cost. In addition, the nature of mobile app distribution is such that successful apps can become popular almost overnight, exacerbating these challenges for customers.

"Many customers tell us they build and maintain their own mobile push services, even though they find this approach expensive, complex and error-prone," said Raju Gulabani, Vice President of Database Services, AWS. "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."

Crittercism is a mobile application performance management company. "Crittercism helps companies of all sizes monitor their apps' performance and identify problems as they're happening, but quickly communicating to large user bases has always been a challenge for the mobile industry," said Andrew Levy, CEO of Crittercism. "AWS services like DynamoDB and now SNS Mobile Push are key building blocks that help us deliver the best experience possible across 600 million mobile devices. SNS Mobile Push means our customers can now notify tens of millions of users in a matter of seconds about critical app performance issues."

"Urban Airship offers market-leading advanced services for some of the world's biggest brands to build relationships using push notifications, and Amazon is a key partner for us," said Scott Kveton, CEO of Urban Airship. "We've supported push on the Kindle since it first launched, and we employ AWS heavy lifting to support many of our services today. Leveraging AWS allows us to continue to focus on delivering great mobile experiences. The raw transmission of push notifications is itself a heavy workload - AWS has proven it can handle huge-scale workloads."

"WeatherBug customers expect immediate notification of alerts anywhere in the world, on any platform and on any device," said Thomas Spendley, Vice President of Engineering of Earth Networks. "In the past, we built the push service for each specific mobile platform but it was expensive and time-consuming. Amazon SNS with Mobile Push is an easy choice because it is both less expensive ($1.00 per million notifications) than our self-managed service was, and also saves us valuable time that we can reinvest into other priorities."

Amazon SNS with Mobile Push can send messages to individual users on specific devices or broadcast identical messages to many subscribers at once, and can easily scale from a few notifications a day to hundreds of millions. Mobile Push is built into Simple Notification Service, which developers already use to notify their customers via SMS text message and e-mail. With Amazon SNS with Mobile Push, developers can focus on engaging their customers instead of the devices those customers happen to choose. Amazon SNS with Mobile Push is available in all public AWS regions. To get started visit: http://aws.amazon.com/sns.

About Amazon Web Services

Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services, Inc. began exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services -- now widely known as cloud computing. The ultimate benefit of cloud computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. Businesses no longer need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources weeks or months in advance. Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon's expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost. Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government and startup customers businesses in 190 countries around the world. Amazon Web Services offers over 30 different services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). AWS services are available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan, Singapore and Australia.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Kindle Paperwhite is the most advanced e-reader ever constructed with 62% more pixels and 25% increased contrast, a patented built-in front light for reading in all lighting conditions, extra-long battery life, and a thin and light design. The new latest generation Kindle, the lightest and smallest Kindle, now features new, improved fonts and faster page turns. Kindle Fire HD features a stunning custom high-definition display, exclusive Dolby audio with dual stereo speakers, high-end, laptop-grade Wi-Fi with dual-band support, dual-antennas and MIMO for faster streaming and downloads, enough storage for HD content, and the latest generation processor and graphics engine – and it is available in two display sizes – 7" and 8.9". The large-screen Kindle Fire HD is also available with 4G wireless. The all-new Kindle Fire features a 20% faster processor, 40% faster performance, twice the memory, and longer battery life.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, www.amazon.cn, www.amazon.it, www.amazon.es, www.amazon.com.br and amazon.in. As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.