Monday, August 12, 2013

Windows Azure Notification Hubs

Windows Azure Notification Hubs was just released for general availability.  These hubs help mobile app developers deliver large numbers of push notifications to mobile users on a wide range of platform.Windows Azure Notification Hubs makes sending push notifications through multiple notification services achievable with just a few lines of code.  Today, apps like the Bing News for Windows 8 are using notification to send millions of push notifications to inform users of the latest breaking news. 

This doesn't replace Windows Azure Mobile Services, which  also supports push notifications. The table below explains the differences.   In short, Mobile Services is best used for communicating to a single user whereas Notification Hubs is best used for communicating to many users simultaneously.


Mobile Services
Notification Hubs
MPNS, WNS, APNS, and GCM support
Yes
Yes
Turnkey event-triggered push
Yes
No
Device registration management
No
Yes
Interest tags for routing messages to a subset of users
No
Yes
Templates for formatting messages to user preferences including language
No
Yes
Broadcast to >1 million devices at once within minutes
No
Yes 

Check out Scott Gu's post for more details.

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