Push Notifications in Android Platform

Question

I am looking to write an app which received pushed alerts from a server. I found a couple of methods to do this.

1. SMS - Intercept the incoming SMS and initiate a pull from the server
2. Poll the server periodically

Each has its own limitations. SMS- no guarantee on arrival time. Poll may drain the battery.

Do you have a better suggestion please?. Thanks much.

Answer 1

I'm afraid you've found both possible methods. Google was, at least initially, going to implement a GChat api you could use for a push/pull implementation. Sadly, that library was cut by Android 1.0.

Answer 2

or....

3) Keep a connection to the server, send keep-alives every few minutes, and the server can push messages instantly. This is how Gmail, Google Talk, etc. works.

Answer 3

(cross-posting from an answer I gave to a similar question - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1243066/does-android-support-near-real-time-push-notification/ )

I recently started playing with MQTT http://mqtt.org for Android as a way of doing this sort of thing (i.e. push notification that is not SMS but data driven, almost immediate message delivery, not polling, etc.)

I have a blog post with background information on this in case it's helpful

http://dalelane.co.uk/blog/?p=938

(Note: MQTT is an IBM technology, and I should point out that I work for IBM.)

Answer 4

Hi. I dont know if this is still useful. I achieved something like this with a java library at http://www.pushlets.com/

Althoug doing it in a service won't prevent android from shutting it down an killing the listener thread.

Answer 5

You can use Xtify (http://developer.xtify.com) - they have a push notifications webservice that works with their SDK. it's free and so far, it's worked really well for me.

Answer 6

There is a new open-source effort to develop a Java library for push notifications on Android based on the Meteor web server. You can check it out at the Deacon Project Blog, where you'll find links to Meteor and the project's GitHub repository. We need developers, so please spread the word!

Answer 7

Hi all, I've expanded on Dale Lane's idea mentioned above of using MQTT for push notifications. You can read about it on my blog:

http://tokudu.com/2010/how-to-implement-push-notifications-for-android/

There is some sample code available and a live demo. Enjoy!

Answer 8

pubsub model may be an alternative http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/

Answer 9

Google's official answer is the Android Cloud to Device Messaging Framework

It will work on Android >= 2.2 (on phones that have the Market app).