Today Amazon has made another mark on it's mobile developer offerings with a new SNS Push service app developers can use to send alerts to iOS, Google Android, and Kindle Fire devices called '
Amazon SNS Mobile Push'.
All AWS customers can now 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).
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.”