Developers: Use Windows Azure Notification Hubs to push notifications to millions of devices

Windows Azure Notification Hubs provide you with an extremely scalable push notification infrastructure that helps you efficiently route cross-platform, personalized push notification messages to millions of users.

Why is this important? For one thing, push notifications are a vital component of connected apps. They allow back-end services to send to specific users and devices frequent and timely updates that can then appear as tile updates, toast notifications, badge updates and more. One app that relies heavily on push notifications is the Bing News App for Windows Phone and Windows 8 (as illustrated by the screenshot above.)

However, sending simultaneous push notifications in a low-latency way to millions of mobile users, and handling real world requirements such as localization, multiple platform devices and user personalization is much harder.

The main reason this is challenging is that push notifications are delivered to the devices by platform-specific services. For example, you have to use the Windows Notification Service (WNS) to push notifications to Windows Store apps, Microsoft Push Notification Service (MPNS) to push to Windows Phone, Apple Push Notification service (APNs) for iOS and Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) for Android.

That’s where Windows Azure Notification Hubs come in. If you’re a developer and you want to know more about how to leverage this tool, read this post over on the Windows App Builder Blog.

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Jeff Meisner
Microsoft News Center Staff