android push notification service comparison

Question

Can anyone give me a comparison for android push notification services. Mainly I want to compare these services.

MQTT - http://mqtt.org/

XTIFY - http://xtify.com/

Mobile Push - https://labs.ericsson.com/apis/mobile-push/

Google's C2DM server

Answer 1

These are partially apples and oranges, however you can get the same push notification effect with varying degrees of difficulty. Full Disclosure I currently use Xtify in my Android app to great success. I'll try not to be biased, but I did choose it for a reason.

MQTT is a wire protocol which specializes in low overhead and queue tolerance. You will need to implement (or find open source) server-side and client-side programs to use MQTT, which will require a fair amount of development time. Java's not great (unlike C) in my opinion at dealing with low level abstractions like network I/O. Benefits resulting from speed/reliability will depend on how good your implementation is.

Xtify is a mature 3rd party push service with some cool features like geo-notifications, timed alerts, statistics, etc. Big benefit to you is that your overhead is low, and it will just work (no time spent debugging low level code). There are several APIs for creating and configuring notifications, pushing, and getting information. Integration of the Xtify SDK into your app will take some time, but I found their support to be very responsive. Xtify announced they will be supporting C2DM in the future.

Mobile Push is another 3rd party push offering by Ericsson which has SMS capabilities (Xtify does not). They have a web API for sending pushes but you do have to write the code to handle the notification once it's received in the app. Another thing to note is that it doesn't look like this project is still under active development. The last version was released in September 2010.

C2DM Is a google offering which is still technically in labs (active development) but is looking like it will be the suggested method to send pushes to Androids in the future. This is pretty barebones push and requires you to handle the notification once it's received like the other 3rd parties. A key discriminator is that only Android OS's 2.2 and above can be reached by C2DM.

Summary

In terms of getting not locked into a product, either Xtify or Mobile Push seem to be pretty good. You can always rewrite web API's but switching to a new solution after writing your own protocol specific interfaces will be harder.

In terms of features Xtify wins out, plus if you ever decide to convert your app to iPhone or Blackberry, it's the same interface.

In terms of simplicity probably Mobile Push is the winner, but again, I would be wary of building production code around out of development or orphaned APIs.

Good Luck! Hope this helps.