iOS Push Notification System Server

Question

I am searching for a solution to create a Push Notification system for a Unity iOS game. In this good tutorial, I see that I need a server.
The aim is to provide general notifications such as App Update, New content, etc...

I have some questions in mind:

• What solution can I use to create a notification server ? It seems that Windows Azure can handle that, no ?
• How can I administrate the notifications ?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Azure can easily handle your push notification needs with APNS (iOS push) support in both Mobile Services and Notification Hubs.
Mobile Services require you to do the administration / management yourself while Notification Hubs will handle all of that (Show you logs, diagnostics on successful pushes, errors, bad registrations) as well as other features like tag based registration (enables pushing to a specific user, among other things) and templates.
If you're just looking at doing Notifications and don't also need to store data, I would take a look at Notification Hubs (http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/notification-hubs/).
As far as Unity support, there is nothing provided by Microsoft today.
However, BitRave has an open source plugin for Azure Mobile Services and Unity (http://www.bitrave.com/azure-mobile-services-for-unity-3d/).
Notification Hubs has everything (registering for push, triggering pushes, etc) exposed via a REST API though so if you're comfortable making HTTP requests with Unity, it should be pretty trivial to connect to Notification Hubs (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn223264.aspx).

As for triggering push notifications, you have a lot of options with Azure including: triggering from your iOS app, using Mobile Services, using a website / cloud service / VM. It depends on what sort of server / triggering architecture you might need.

Answer 2

Use pushsharp . This works for all the devices and it's free

Answer 3

Checkout Parse.com. Dev license is free and you get 1 million API calls and a ton of Push Notification pushes. My experience with Azure is that it's pretty lackluster and difficult to do some of the things that Parse.com can do.