Rails on Heroku gem for mobile push notifications

Question

What gem would you recommend for sending Push Notifications to mobile devices?

Context:

• Rails 3 app hosted on Heroku
• Small scale (Currently order of hundreds push notifications a week)
• Currently iOS only but extensible to multiple platforms (Android, WP) [Desirable, but not required]

Requirements:

• If a new spawned process, low runtime to keep heroku costs low
• Supports feedback service
• Multi platform support

Current alternatives:

• https://github.com/jwang/apn_on_rails (or one of its forks)
• https://github.com/justintv/APNS

Any suggestions/recommendations appreciated.

Answer 1

So far we are using UrbanAirship for push notification to devices, its ruby wrapper is also available https://github.com/groupon/urbanairship .

You can also use pusher.com which supports websocket (push can be sent on web).(heroku's add on is also available for pusher.com)

Using any of above will just forward the request to these third parties for sending push notification and there will be no load on your herokus server.

Answer 2

I created a gem in order to create a central push notifications, it supports iOS and Android at the moment, but i will add more platforms.

This gem doesn`t use background tasks, maybe this will help you out too

here is the link: https://github.com/NicosKaralis/pushmeup

Answer 3

You can use my gem: https://github.com/tompesman/push-core

This gem allows you to send messages to APNS, GCM and C2DM. Runs perfectly on Heroku with just a single dyno. The gem has a customisable feedback class which you can modify to fit your application. Regarding the multi platform support, which platforms are you considering?