Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) with Mobile Push, a fast, fully managed, cross-platform push notification service in the cloud. With one simple API, application developers can easily send notifications to Apple iOS, Google Android and Kindle Fire devices. All AWS customers can 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). To learn more about Amazon SNS Mobile Push, visit: http://aws.amazon.com/sns.
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.”
Crittercism is a mobile application performance management company. “Crittercism helps companies of all sizes monitor their apps’ performance and identify problems as they’re happening, but quickly communicating to large user bases has always been a challenge for the mobile industry,” said Andrew Levy, CEO of Crittercism. “AWS services like DynamoDB and now SNS Mobile Push are key building blocks that help us deliver the best experience possible across 600 million mobile devices. SNS Mobile Push means our customers can now notify tens of millions of users in a matter of seconds about critical app performance issues.”
“Urban Airship offers market-leading advanced services for some of the world’s biggest brands to build relationships using push notifications, and Amazon is a key partner for us,” said Scott Kveton, CEO of Urban Airship. “We’ve supported push on the Kindle since it first launched, and we employ AWS heavy lifting to support many of our services today. Leveraging AWS allows us to continue to focus on delivering great mobile experiences. The raw transmission of push notifications is itself a heavy workload – AWS has proven it can handle huge-scale workloads.”
“WeatherBug customers expect immediate notification of alerts anywhere in the world, on any platform and on any device,” said Thomas Spendley, Vice President of Engineering of Earth Networks. “In the past, we built the push service for each specific mobile platform but it was expensive and time-consuming. Amazon SNS with Mobile Push is an easy choice because it is both less expensive ($1.00 per million notifications) than our self-managed service was, and also saves us valuable time that we can reinvest into other priorities.”
Amazon SNS with Mobile Push can send messages to individual users on specific devices or broadcast identical messages to many subscribers at once, and can easily scale from a few notifications a day to hundreds of millions. Mobile Push is built into Simple Notification Service, which developers already use to notify their customers via SMS text message and e-mail. With Amazon SNS with Mobile Push, developers can focus on engaging their customers instead of the devices those customers happen to choose. Amazon SNS with Mobile Push is available in all public AWS regions. To get started visit: http://aws.amazon.com/sns.
