Microsoft Azure Notification Hubs

You may send alerts to any platform (iOS, Android, Windows, etc.) from any back end using Azure Notification Hubs’ user-friendly and scaled-out push engine (cloud or on-premises). Both business and consumer scenarios benefit greatly from the use of notification hubs. Here are a few situations to consider:

1. Send low-latency breaking news alerts to millions of people.

2. Send coupons depending on user segments’ geographic interests.

3. Send users or groups event-related notifications for applications in the media, sports, financial, and gaming industries.

4. Push marketing materials to apps to engage users and market to them.

5. alerting consumers to business hap emails like new emails and work items

6. For multi-factor authentication, send codes.

What are push notifications?

Users of mobile apps are informed of specifically required information via push notifications, typically in the form of a pop-up or dialogue box on a mobile device. In general, users have the option of seeing or ignoring the message; selecting the former launches the mobile application that delivered the notification. Some alerts are provided silently and are processed and handled by the app in the background.

Push notifications are essential for enterprise apps to deliver up-to-date business information and for consumer apps to increase engagement and usage. Because it is flexible for notification senders, energy-efficient for mobile devices, and accessible even when the relevant applications are not open, it is the best app-to-user communication method.

How do push notifications work?

Platform Notification Systems, which are platform-specific infrastructures, are used to send push alerts. They lack a standard interface and only provide minimal push functionality for sending messages to devices using the handles that are provided. The developer must individually interact with Apple Push Notification Service (APNS), Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), and Windows Notification Service to notify all users across an app’s Android, iOS, and Windows versions (WNS).

At a high level, here is how push works:

1. When an app wants to receive a notification, it gets in touch with the PNS for the target platform it’s running on and asks for a special, temporary push handle. The system determines the handle type (for example, WNS uses URIs while APNS uses tokens).

2. This handle is saved by the client app in the provider's backend.

3. The app backend contacts the PNS with the handle to target a particular client app to send a push notification.

The PNS forwards the notification to the device specified by the handle.

The challenges of push notifications

PNSes are strong. To accomplish even basic push notification situations, such as sending push alerts to specific user segments, they leave a lot of work to the app developer.

Push notification transmission requires a sophisticated infrastructure that is independent of the primary business logic of the application. The following are a few infrastructural challenges:

Platform dependency

PNSes are not unified, so in order to send notifications to devices on different platforms, the backend needs to use complicated and challenging platform-dependent logic.

Scale

Device tokens must be updated upon every app launch in accordance with PNS regulations. Just to update the tokens, the backend must handle a lot of traffic and database access. When there are hundreds of thousands or millions of devices, building and maintaining this infrastructure becomes quite expensive.

The majority of PNSes do not offer multi-device broadcasting. A straightforward broadcast sent to 1,000,000 devices generates 1,000,000 calls to PNSes. It is challenging to scale this volume of data while maintaining low latency.

Routing

PNSes give users the option to broadcast messages to devices, however, most app notifications are directed at specific users or interest groups. A register that connects devices to users, properties, interest groups, etc. must be kept up to date by the backend. The time to market and maintenance expenses of an app are increased by this overhead.

Why use Azure Notification Hubs?

All difficulties involved in manually sending push notifications from the backend of your app are removed by notification hubs. Push-related coding is minimized because of its multi-platform, scaled-out push notification system, which also makes your backend simpler. As demonstrated in the following image, devices using notification hubs just need to register their PNS handles with the hub; the backend handles sending messages to users or interest groups.

Notification Hubs is your ready-to-use push engine with the following advantages:

Cross platforms

1. All the main push platforms are supported.

2. a universal interface that may be used to push data to all platforms in platform-neutral or platform-specific formats without requiring platform-specific effort.

3. The management is handled centrally by the device.

Cross backends

1. Cloud or on-premises.

2. .NET, Node.js, Java, Python, etc.

Rich set of delivery patterns

1. Broadcast to one or more platforms: With only one API call, you can quickly broadcast to millions of devices on all the major platforms.

2. Push to the device: Specific devices can receive notifications.

3. Tags and templates enable you to push content to a user’s whole cross-platform array of devices.

4. Push to segment with dynamic tags: Whether you are sending to a single segment or an expression of segments, the tags feature enables you to segment devices and push to them in accordance with your demands (For example, active AND lives in Seattle NOT new user). You are not limited to publish-subscribe and can update device tags whenever you want.

5. Localized push: The templates function makes it possible to localize without modifying the backend code.

6. Silent push: By delivering silent messages to devices and instructing them to perform specific pulls or actions, you can enable the push-to-pull sequence.

7. Push alerts can be scheduled to be sent at any time.

8. Direct push: You can batch-push to a list of device handles without registering the devices with the Notification Hubs service.

9. Push notifications with customized key-value pairs can be sent to individual devices using device push variables.

Rich telemetry

1. There are two ways to access general push, device, error, and operation telemetry: programmatically and on the Azure site.

2. From your initial request call through the Notification Hubs service successfully issuing the pushes, each push is tracked using per-message telemetry.

3. Feedback from Platform Notification Systems conveys all PNS feedback to aid in debugging.

Scalability

1. Without re-architecting or device sharing, send quick messages to millions of devices.

Security

2. Either federated authentication or shared access secret (SAS).

Feature of Azure Notification Hub

Fast broadcast to millions of devices

With support for APNs (Apple Push Notification Service), GCM (Google Cloud Messaging), WNS (Windows Push Notification Service), and more, Azure Notification Hubs is a massively scalable mobile push notification engine for sending millions of notifications to iOS, Android, Windows, or Kindle devices in a flash. With just a few lines of code, you can customize your notifications for individual clients or whole audiences across any platform.

Works with any back end

Because of their adaptability, Notification Hubs may be plugged into any back end, including Microsoft.NET, PHP, Java, and Node. whether it’s in the cloud or on-premises. This makes it simpler to contact your customers and immediately update your mobile apps.

Target any audience with dynamic tags

Broadcast push notifications to everyone at once or target specific customer devices using the Notification Hubs tagging feature. Tags let you segment customers based on activity, interest, location, or preference, so you deliver the right content to the right person at the right time.

Make localization easier with templates

If your app covers multiple markets, the templates feature of Notification Hubs gives you a handy way to send localized push notifications, so you’re speaking to customers in their languages. Templates also eliminate the hassle of storing the localization settings for each customer or creating hundreds of tags.

Designed for massive scale

Quickly scale to millions of mobile devices and billions of notifications without re-architecting or sharding. Notification Hubs automatically handle the infrastructure necessary to scale your message to every active device with low latency.

Conclusion

As a component of the Azure cloud computing platform, Microsoft offers Azure Notification Hubs, a multi-platform, scalable cloud-based push notification service. It enables developers to quickly send push notifications to web browsers and mobile devices such as iOS, Android, and Windows. It supports sending notifications to a single device, a group of devices, or a multitude of devices at once. Additionally, Notification Hubs offer tools for controlling devices and dealing with device feedback, including when a user unsubscribes from alerts.