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I have an iphone app which I need to send push notifications to, from a rails backend server.

Can anybody suggest a gem or other approach to doing this?

I have looked at the apn_on_rails gem which seems to be very good, but as I use delayed job, ideally I would be able to integrate the gem with DJ.

I have also looked at AppNotify and Urban Airship services as an alternative.

Does anybody have any experience with these services, are they worth using in preference to implementing the notifications myself, or does anybody know of any other gems that might be useful?

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2 Answers 2

There's a free push service called Xtify which has some cool features like geo targeting over the other solutions you mentioned. I've used it in my app to much success.

Their iPhone SDK gets integrated into your app and you upload your provisioning files through their console, relieving you of keeping track of device tokens and communication through APNS.

After the integration, your backend can use the actionwebservice gem to send content to their web services, or set up repeating notifications.

Haven't used urban airship, but I think you have to pay.

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Thanks, I'll look into that service. Much appreciated. –  Flyweight Jun 22 '11 at 19:57

Parse also has a Push Notifications service (free up to 1 million pushes). They have a REST API that you can call from Ruby.

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