Amazon Web Services, the part of Amazon.com that offers cloud-based computer infrastructure to companies, has announced a new service for mobile application developers. It’s expanded its Amazon Simple Notification Service (which already offers email and SMS notification) to include ‘Mobile Push’, enabling a single Application Programming Interface to send notifications to Apple iOS, Google Android and Kindle Fire devices.
Although each of the major mobile platforms runs a free relay service to deliver notifications, developers have previously needed to integrate with all of the relay services if they wanted to create an app that worked on different operating systems.
Customers of Amazon Web Services can use Amazon SNS Mobile Push at no extra charge if they’re sending up to one million notifications each month. After that, there’s a cost of $1 for every million messages published and delivered.
Raju Gulabani, Vice President of Database Services at AWS, said “Many customers tell us they build and maintain their own mobile push services, even though they find this approach expensive, complex and error-prone. 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.”
Amazon SNS with Mobile Push can send individual messages or can broadcast identical messages to many users.