Abstract
Push notifications have been an important feature in the computing services world. They have been one of the most requested cloud services and have been widely implemented in mobile phones, tablets and personal computers. In spite of them being used so extensively, the framework required to make them work is still quite complex and largely unrelated to the logic of the app. Today, app developers who target multiple platforms need a separate data provider for each type of device since they all use different protocols. They need to manage different types of notification systems and interface with their respective protocols in order to push messages. This means that app developers need to do unnecessary work in order to implement even common scenarios. These scenarios could be related to broadcasting, tiling or sending toast notifications to segmented users. In this paper, I propose the Universal Push Notification Service which eliminates the complexity of setting up push notifications. The service provides APIs that deliver messages across multiple platforms like iOS, Android and Windows. It requires no setting up. The APIs provide a registration service to register all applications and provide a push service to relay notifications to different devices. We shall make use of the notification hubs in order to setup the infrastructure. Notification hubs use a full cross-platform push notification infrastructure, and appreciably reduce the notification specific code that runs in the app backend. Devices are only responsible for registering the platform native notification handles, and the backend takes the responsibility for sending platform specific messages to users or interest groups.