ZeroPush - Simple push notifications on iOS

15 Apr 2015

I was recently working on an iOS application which requires push notifications. It is a not-so-pleasurable experience for any developer to configure the backend of the application to send push notifications. The general reasons for this displeasure are due to device/token management on the server and worker processes on the server which should send the notifications without blocking the main thread.

I recently bumped upon ZeroPush which relieves the developer of both of these pain points. The implementation of ZeroPush for push notifications was very easy both on the client and server side.

Device/Token management:

ZeroPush takes care of registering the device to the Apple’s Push notification. If you wish not to undergo the pain of token management at all, using ZeroPush named channels where the user can listen to notifications can be created and listened to. This gives a breath of fresh air to the developers who loves to save a lot of time.

Push notification management:

On the server side, (in my case, a rails application in Heroku), integrating ZeroPush was easy with their gem. Once their gem is added, the notifications can be sent by creating a hash table with the necessary parameters:

ZeroPush.notify({
	device_token: ['token1', 'token2'],
	alert: 'This is a notification',
	badge: 1,
	sound: "default",
	info: {
		'use': 'Anyother information that needs to be sent to the device along with the payload'
	}
})

[Yes, I still went with tokens than using channels :(] This makes a rest call to the ZeroPush server which takes care of the notifications. But for ZeroPush, I might have ended up writing SideKiq worker processes, backed by Redis which definitely is not as easy as this.

ZeroPush comes at a very small price (starting at $10 per month), but it is definitely much cheaper than installing SideKiq/Redis on Heroku and, not to mention, the effort involved.