Develop Reference

Can I receive mobile push notifications from SNS without a dedicated app?

I want to setup some maintenance related messages that would be dispatched to Slack and ideally some mobile users via push notifications (avoiding SMS if I can). I already handled Slack via some SNS + Lambda combo, and I'm tackling the Mobile push part.
I was somehow hoping I could just subscribe my phone number to some SNS channel but I guess its not so simple yet...
If my understanding is correct, it is not possible to receive push notifications without an App, since the Cloud-to-mobile-push service actually needs a client running on the device.
Actually, from what I can read on the internet it would seem most articles and documentations explain how to setup push notifications inside some application along with other features (and basically the push notifications is just one feature amongst the others), and that the push notification is not an end in itself.
However, I am just interested subscribing to push notifications as an end in itself (I don't need any other app feature).
What is the way to proceed in this case ? Are there some generic apps that are made for this and would let me subscribe to any mobile "push-list" ? Are there some kits that let one easily make an app just for the purpose of receiving push messages ? Is there maybe a builtin way in Android/iOS to subscribe to a push list without downloading a different app ?
EDIT : I am in the eu-central-1 region. I have some serviced in eu-west-1 (sending emails to SES) but otherwise all my servers and alarms are in eu-central-1

Which notifications should i use, Push notification or local notification?

I have a cross platform application and i want to send notification to sign in users about their messages.
Now I confused about uses of push, local notifications.
What I think of Push notifications is that it is for sending Announcements to users which is not specifically related to their account only.
Can anyone help me out with what should I use? I already used Local notifications in one of my applications with such requirement.

It mainly depends on; is the data coming from local or remote?
You cannot control when your users open the app, and only when they open the app (with a few exceptions) you are able to fetch data. Then with that data you would be able to schedule a local notification. But in most cases that doesn't make much sense, because they have already loaded and probably seen the data. It only makes sense when you schedule an alarm clock for instance.
When you want the data to come from remote, like when they receive a message, you will have to use push notifications. The user is then alerted that new data is available without having to go look for it themselves. It is pushed to them.
However, for push notifications you will need infrastructure which you did not when using local notifications. You will need a server to handle the push notifications (Azure has some awesome functionalities for this) and some trigger to send push notifications. This can be an insert on a database, or a scheduled task. Also, the user has to enable push notifications and your app has to register itself to be able to receive them. It can be a pain to implement it the first time.

It depends on for what reason you're sending the notification.
A local notification is sent locally on the device, so it doesn't need an internet connection. Examples could be:
Send a birthday message when the user has birthday
In a harvesting game, send a local notification when the store is full
A Push Notification is sent from a server and it requires internet on your device to receive it. Examples:
You get a message in a chat while the app is not open (if I understand your question right, this is your case)
In a game: realtime events which are triggered by a server
So in your case, if guess you want to notify the user about new messages if he does not have the app opened. This notification comes from a server and is a Push Notification.

As you describe you want to send notification about sign in users about their messages. so it would be the real time notification about when there is message for user you need to notify the user. so apple having PushNotification is the best approach you need to apply for this. using that you can directly notify user about the new messages.
Why LocalNotification is not useful in this scenario?
I think messaging is the realtime stuff. local notification is not for that. its for only managing local notify stuff. like reminder OR to do added task.. and many more

How can I set up an app server to send device to device notification via FCM?

I have set up push notification from Firebase console and I can send push notifications. However, I cannot send device-to-device notification yet. As I gather I would need an external app server that would observe Firebase nodes for change and then would fire off a notification via FCM.
I have seen similar question in SO here and a good but brief and not so complete explanation by Frank van Puffelen here. But I am still quite confused. Any tutorial or help as to how I can set up an app server (XMPP here) that would do the communication between client app instances and Firebase for sending notification when ChildAdded or modified and handling the key exchanges would be appreciated. (as I understand, FCM needs XMPP protocol for sending upstream notification)
Any help would be appreciated.

Following this tutorial.
Send Notifications from Server
What you can do is, setup an external server using your favorite technology to listen child_added or changed and respond to the notification requests.
We used the node.js app engine to handle this. Again the funda is to move people to use other cloud paid services.

Yours it's a good question... The firebase can't send push device-to-device, then if you want to do this one, needs a app server as you said. The other possibility that I thought for a long time is a create a independent service to do two things, the first one is constantly controls events as onChildAdded, for exemple and the second one, throws local notifications.
This is solution that i think works fine before to create a app server... At final if you try to do it, explain us your experience please! Greetings!

Push Notification from one android device to another

Here I am developing an android app which deals with housing complex.
In this app their are 2 kinds of users:
Builder/Complex Owner
Flat Owner.
Now here the Builder/Complex Owner can send push notification to flat owners.
How can I achieve that? Please help.
Here I cannot use G.C.M as G.C.M. is used for server side push messaging.

Not sure if there is any other way. What you could do is to let the app send a push notification request to the server, then the server would issue the push notification through G.C.M. If you don't have a server available you could do it through text messages but be sure to have a good text messaging plan. You could possibly also use an existing service (for example Facebook) and send the messages through their API.
EDIT:
To do it via text messages: SMS receive with no notification. Again, make sure that you have a good text messaging plan if doing this. Sending an SMS to ten different people will count as ten different SMS messages.. If you have a lot of users it would probably be cheaper to get hold of an SMS server. But then again, you should just use G.C.M.

It is possible to send device to device push notification using gcm.See this link.

How to send batch requests to C2DM (Android push service)?

I am working on how to send push notification to c2dm. According to the documentation, I need to post the requests to c2dm one by one. If there is several thousands of push request, it will be a headache.
Is there any way to send batch requests like Apple push notification service ?
Thanks.

At present, Android C2DM does not provide batch messaging, and nothing has been announced.