Overview of Mobile Push Notification Services

Recently, I noticed for myself that for me it became inconvenient to receive notifications from various programs by email. The term “email overload” has long been established and companies like Google are trying to work with this (they enter folders, filters, and now tabs in Gmail).

I liked the concept of the notification center, which successfully showed itself on the Android OS, appeared in iOS6 and is scheduled for release on Windows Phone. This is one tape of notifications for all services, convenient viewing, working with notifications, simple cleaning of the list. I learned from my own experience that this is much more convenient than the usual email notifications that turn inbox into a mess.

Since our team is working on several projects at the same time (“builds” are flying somewhere, changes are pushing somewhere, and so on), it seemed to me interesting to connect our projects to this type of notification of events occurring in the system. Ideally, I wanted to be able to send notifications to different team members, and, if necessary, to the whole team as well. Only I wanted to get them exactly from the software I work with - from the tools of Continuous Integration and automatic testing to the error logs, statistics and critics from projects.

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I did not consider the option to create my own application, so in my free time I studied the existing tools for sending custom notifications. I was interested in products with a ready-made native mobile application for receiving notifications and, of course, an API for connecting to software.

In the course of studying the issue, I contacted the developers of the Jeapie service from Ukraine, who, when asked about the speed of their service, kindly provided me with their indicators in comparison with other services. This prompted me to publish this review.

So,

Boxcar

Website: http://boxcar.io/
Founded: 2009 (absorbed by ProcessOne in 2012)
Platforms: iOS, Web version, Mac desktop
Price: Client-application for free ($ 4.99 for disabling advertising inside the application)
API limit: 200 notifications per minute for free. At the same time, the limit is 100 Android and iOS clients subscribed to the provider. For mass mailings will have to buy a paid subscription (rates from 7 euros per month)
Possibility to do the newsletter: Yes
Summary. Boxcar is a rather old and client-oriented service. Positions itself as an aggregator. From ready-made integrations, rather custom ones, such as notifications from Twitter, Facebook, Email gateway.
Now the service is under reconstruction. They plan to switch to mobile backend models (like UrbanAirship, Parse, etc.). They promise big updates to the release of iOS7.

ProwlApp

Website: http://www.prowlapp.com
Year of foundation: 2009
Platforms: iOS
Price: $ 2.99.
API limit: 1000 requests per hour from one IP.
Ability to do newsletter: No
Summary. The service is quite old and immediately scares off the design. Prowl is focused more on the personal needs of developers. During this time of existence, very many integrations and libraries have been done, there are a lot of how-to articles. On GitHub alone, there are more than 150 repositories with integrations.

Jeapie

Website: http://demo.jeapie.com/
Year of foundation: 2013
Platforms: Android, iOS, PC (Chrome Extension), Web version
Price: Free (beta)
Ability to do newsletter: Yes.
API Restriction: Unlimited (beta)
Summary. Quite a young project, on which a team from Ukraine is working. Currently in open beta, there are no restrictions on use. It can be used both personally and for teams (there is an address and group distribution). The team is very responsive, they respond to letters quickly, actively implement features and fixes bugs. Already there is integration with GitHub (notifications at commits), they plan to move towards project management systems, bug trackers in the near future. Also ready libraries for popular programming languages ​​and frameworks.

Notifymyandroid

Website: http://www.notifymyandroid.com/
Year of foundation: 2011
Platforms: Android
Price: Free up to 5 notifications per day. Unlimited - $ 4.99 per client application.
API limit: 800 requests per hour. If you need more, then you need to contact the developers.
Ability to do newsletter: No
Summary. There are a very large number of integrations with various programs, for example, you can send yourself notifications on Android from the Chrome extension, create Zapier-recipes, redirect notifications from Growl for Windows. The positioning is similar to Prowl, also more for individual use by a specialist. From the title it is clear that iOS support is not planned.

Pushover

Website: https://pushover.net/
Year of foundation: 2012
Platforms: Android, iOS
Price: The client application for receiving notifications costs $ 4.99.
API limit: 7500 requests per month for a single application. An additional 10,000 will cost $ 50.
Possibility to do a newsletter: No, although you can make it a “crutch” method through device identifiers.
Summary. The service is well developed for personal use, there is a flexible application setting, you can set different priorities and even ringtones to notifications. Integration is both with popular CMS (Wordpress, Drupal), and with some not very well-known services. There is a fairly large set of libraries for different programming languages ​​and frameworks.

I certainly liked the products that allow you to try to work for free (trial), which in my opinion is very important for such a software plan. Boxcar, Pushover and Jeapie were best suited for my task, as they allow you to send notifications to a group of users at the same time.

API Speed ​​Measurement Results

The speed of delivery of notifications to the device is difficult to calculate, since it is tied to the GCM / APNS server, but the API response rate can be measured.

For the test, VPS servers were used - St. Petersburg, USA, Germany.

Boxcar
Link: boxcar.io/devices/providers/{API_KEY}/notifications
Result:


Prowlapp
Link: api.prowlapp.com/publicapi/add
Result:


Jeapie
Link: api.jeapie.com/v2/personal/send/message.json
Result:


NotifyMyAndroid
Link: notifymyandroid.com/publicapi/notify
Result:


Pushover
Link: api.pushover.net/1/messages.json
Result:


The reason for the speed of Jeapie for Russia is its geographical position (to a greater extent) + Node.js

For myself, I decided to set up such notifications for Jenkins CI so as to receive notifications about the status of builds, incl. and more beautiful.
The most pleasant is to use Jeapie and Pushover, let's see how they show themselves in combat conditions.

UPDATE:
The guys from Jeapie are now concentrating on a new product - an SDK to increase user retention in mobile applications (using push notifications, in-app messages and analytics).
And the application for receiving notifications moved to demo.jeapie.com