title: Azure Notifications Hub, Direct Send vs Installations
body: <p>We are implementing a backend service that gets device registration tokens from a backend system.
  The device registration tokens are obtained by the mobile device from the platform PNS.</p>
  
  <p>The tokens are stored with the user profile in the backend, we use that data to poll/stream from the backend through our integration service. (fyi, we are sending out scheduled push notifications that user can set up in an app).</p>
  
  <p>We only plan to send out push notifications to individual users.</p>
  
  <p>An individual user can have multiple devices on different platforms (iOS/Android at the moment).</p>
  
  <p>For simplicity we now are looking at Direct Send.</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/notificationhubs/direct-send" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/notificationhubs/direct-send</a></p>
  
  <p>We get the device registration token(s) per user and send out a push.
  We iterate over the devices as we keep device registration token along with the platform type.
  Based on platform type we send out the correct format, headers, etc.
  This means we would have the tokens we need to send out push notifications.</p>
  
  <p>Would there be any concerns in using this approach?
  This way we would skip the installation (or registration) part completely.
  If we would like to send out push out notifications to all users and devices and some point in the future, direct send won't help us, but in that scenario we might look at batch send.</p>
  
  <p>The other solution would be using installations with tags, and create a tag per user.
  But if a user would have an iOS device and an Android device, we would still need to split that out.</p>
  
  <p>So i'd like to know are there any drawbacks on direct send or things i overlook here?</p>