I need to develop an application which sends notification to other device based on current action.
The device on which I need to send notification that might be iOS device or Android device too I am not sure which device he/she is using.
I know about remote notification and push notification in Android and iOS respectively which work for either for Android or iOS only.
But I dont know about the notifications which can work between these two different OS, so If anybody can help me, it would be a great help.
Your query is sounds different and tricky,
There are two alternative to achieve this task.
First thing you can use Web-Service and sending and receiving
request & response as per that platform code. like request parmas should be fix and base on that you have to read that response.So,it could be easy task.
Next way is long and complex.Like create background Bluetooth connection sending your message to other device either it could be message or file.If you are sending a file then you have to read via file stream.
But second trick have limitation and that is area both device should be in Bluetooth range.
So, i would like to prefer first way to achieve your task.
I think you can create a web service that will use GCM (for Android) and Push Notifications for (iOS). This is the standard way the notifications are created, but you can do other interesting stuffs with it, something like, you register your device by sending the notification tokne, OS, and a name or other details that your app stores or display and in response you get similar users/data which you can notify. When you want to notify a device/user/etc, you just send a request to the server with the name/user (something unique) and the server will get the token from the database, the OS, and will decide what to use GCM or push notificatiom, and the device will be notified.
Also there are a lots of tutorials for implementing GCM notifications and push notification, both on server side and mobile side
"Next way is long and complex.Like create background Bluetooth connection sending your message to other device either it could be message or file.If you are sending a file then you have to read via file stream."
But still do you think it's possible to achieve ?
In some case it can be usefull, let me explain. For people (like me) who have a 5" smartphones or more (ascend mate 6.3"), they could be tempt to let their huge phone in their bag, unless you have giant pockets. So let say you also have an ipod touch in your pocket and the huge smartphone in your bag, your ipod touch can be able to inform you if you have received any mails, text, phone calls or any notification you can imagine.
Well I hope understand what I'm thinking of.
Related
I am trying to use GCM service, Every thing is OK except of the long delay that GCM push notification or deliver payload... some times it take to my App 5 minutes receive notification or payload.
I need Immediate delivering...
I know about the roles of GCM, that wait until the other device got online, but in my case I hold two devices and they are online, but I got Delayed notifications!
How does WhatsApp(as example of app that uses GCM) overcome this problem.. and send Immediately?
[ i.e (message of the type: typing, online - last seen) cannot be delayed...]
the GCM Delayed Push is known problem : this issue
my question is: How other app that use GCM overcome this issue
The big players
Lets focus on WhatsApp from a scale point of view. Their scale is global and one of the largest in terms of the market share. For players like these it becomes necessary to provide a consistent and smooth user experience no matter what the circumstances are. This means that the "small fish developers" like us are left with pre-defined rules by the big fish companies. Sometimes, it is the implementation that is challenging enough that a lot of the small time developers have to do with whatever is available.
I would like to take WhatsApp's Push Notification as an example to illustrate the above.
First of all, we must stop associating Push notification with Google's services(i.e, Google Play Services) exclusively. Would a device without Google Play services won't receive Push notifications? No, of course it can -- try focusing on the core mechanism of a push notification
How do Push Notifications work - Sockets!
Contrary to a protocol like HTTP which assumes a client-server architecture and is a uni-directional protocol(server can't initiate communication by itself), a plain socket enables communication bi-directionally.
You want to implement your own File transfer protocol over socket? You can!
You want to implement your own Chatting protocol over socket? You can!
You want to implement your own Push notifications protocol over socket? You can!
A socket is the canvas of communication over a network. You can pretty much do anything. Personally we have developed a custom request-response protocol in our organization.
Multiple implementations
Don't stick with default GCM/FCM notification messages protocol or implementation. You can deploy a mechanism to maintain a persistent socket connection with the device and can listen to whatever the server wants to push.
WhatsApp uses both GCM/FCM as well as their proprietary XMPP server implementation for Push notifications
WhatsApp(and several other Apps) rely upon GCM/FCM(as option 1 - the default) as it is present as a system App on lot of devices and therefore holds a special status where it is very less likely to be killed unlike a normal App.
For devices that do not have play services, your custom socket connection is relied upon. It may be that FCM is preferred over socket when the former is available but those are upto you to manage.
From WhatsApp's latest build(2.19.203):
Notice that the relevant permission for FCM is present.
Suspected socket implementation: https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/43970/how-is-whatsapp-able-to-receive-messages-when-not-in-use
XMPP based Push Notifications
From, https://www.quora.com/Does-WhatsApp-use-GCM-to-exchange-messages
No, whatsapp doesn't use GCM[NOT entirely true]. It uses a modified version of XMPP
called FunXMPP instead. It changes the XML keywords in message frames
to save bandwidth as it's users aka mostly mobile network users,
doesn't have a good internet connection. The replacements can be found
here: mgp25/Chat-API (I am not the author though)
They have even asked for whitelisting of any port(custom) in use by them.
So, WhatsApp does it. Facebook does it. Google does it. A lot of these companies do this. You can do it as well(to an extent) using Ejjaberd, Openfire or some other technology and having a proper client side implementation for the same.
Chinese ROMs
Some chinese ROMs have taken it even further and radically changed the way the memory and processes are managed in Android. As an example, in Oppo if the Application doesn't have Auto Start turned on, it will not let you do anything once your App is killed. No hopes of any experience whatsoever except hoping that the user will open the App again. In these cases, these OEMs have whitelisted WhatsApp, Facebook, Google and other players selectively. So, who suffers?
Us. Period.
When sending your notification you could set the priority-parameter to "high".
From the docs:
By default, messages are sent with normal priority. Normal priority optimizes the client app's battery consumption, and should be used unless immediate delivery is required. For messages with normal priority, the app may receive the message with unspecified delay.
When a message is sent with high priority, it is sent immediately, and the app can wake a sleeping device and open a network connection to your server.
I know this answer comes late, nevertheless if you are still facing this issue (or anyone else) please tell me if it helps.
Currently I am trying to implement a feature where if I do some action in my app on one android device (changing channel on android tv), it should trigger my another android device in close proximity to launch one of its application.
I was just wondering which could be the easiest way to prototype it? Should I need to send some kind of push notification or another simple solution is possible? I just need it for prototyping as of now.
Thanks
You can use GCM with XMPP protocol that allows device-to-cloud connection. In the documentation you will find examples, just read it through.
This technique is very often called device to device but it's actually about upstreaming to the server and telling the server to push notification.
Requirement for both apps would be to use the same GCM sender ID.
Since this is a prototype you don't actually need to check if device is close to you or not. Otherwise, you could frequently update device's location on the server.
I think you want to develop a application like airdroid
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sand.airdroid&hl=en
As i know it set up small http server in one phone. And Send request from an another device. As you want. This sample help you to create such kind of http server. There is one restriction both device must be in same network.
https://github.com/NanoHttpd/nanohttpd.
I have already implemented a push notification system for the android. My system works as following: From my server I communicate through the Http protocol with the google servers. Then the google servers are sending the notification to the mobiles. So, I was wondering if there are any alternatives ways to implement this functionality. However, I want something which will be reliable.
P.S. I would like to hear opinions from people that they implement something similar.
Not sure why you're looking for something else, if you've already got it working through the Google servers, but a good system to send push notifications easily is Urban Airship.
I was working with some Chinese tablets that could not receive android push notifs (very annoying). I had to implement a Comet like system on android.
Basically, on the android device, I created a service which essentially polled a URL. But since polling is very battery intensive, I used a push technique called long-polling. I had the Android http client set a very long timeout. I then on the server side had the server hold the connection open also for a very long time. What would end up happening is that as soon as a message had to be passed, the connection would finish, and the android device would get the message immediately. This is just an additional method of "push" technology.
The only other option not discussed here is a persistant TCP/IP connection. This can be very dicey because Android could kill the service at will, and it can be somewhat battery intensive as well.
From my experience, GCM is the best method out there, and I wish there was something as good as it available for iOS Devices!
Does anyone know how to implement communication between 2 android devices over the internet without using App Engine? For example, I have 2 Android devices, and I want to send a stream of data from one to the second one over the internet. I would like to know, if someone could give me an idea, how could I identify the second device (or how to create a communication channel between two devices ), so I could initiate the transfer (this is not possible using IP addresses ?).If i were to have my own server, which is the best way to go to accomplish this? If someone could point me to some useful resources I would be grateful.I have some background on android programming.
One way I was thinking to accomplish this was to write an android application, and when the user enters it, it will start a service. This service will then listen for network events and registers on my own server with the username and the IP address of the device as available.When another device wants to send data, it will connect to the server, search for the target device (by username key), gets the IP address and sends the data. Could this work, or does anybody have other suggestions?
One way I thought about doing this is making
(excuse the spelling mistakes if any)
It would help if we knew what kind of data you were trying to transfer.
For small bits of information, like notifications, events, and the like, I would suggest doing an HTTP POST to a server that has C2DM capabilities, and using the server as an intermediary.
For larger data, the only way I can think of to do it is to set up a SyncAdapter, then upload the information to the server. The delay will be a bit longer, but you'll reliably get the information downloaded from the server to the phone. So less of a communication API and more of a dropbox for phones.
I haven't done much with NFC, but that may be something you want to look into.
is there any build-in mechanism in Android, which could create a service or app that actully listens to some server from the out side.. something that will "Wake up" the phone and makes him receaving a message from an outside server (i am asking this coz most of the appz are working the way aroound, when the phone sending requests to an outside server to recieve data)
is it possible any how ?
thanks.
No. You app needs to poll the server.
There is a possibility in Froyo to register your App for Intents that are sent do the phone from a remote server. Sadly this will only be a possibility if Froyo (Android 2.2) will become used on more phones. Also it could be possible that this intents can only be received while your screen is on.