app-engine iOS push notification project not sending notifications

Question

I am using the Google Sample project to setup push notification on my app-engine backend. I believe that I have followed the project to the letter, but my notifications are still not being delivered to iOS. I am tracking everything on app-engine and I see that the task queue supposedly sends my notifications. But my iPhone is not receiving them. Also I already checked that I am registering the correct deviceToken on my server. So now I am thinking that something about the project itself is not right. To double check that my iPhone is fine, I try sending with Urban Airship and it works. I Cannot afford the kind of pricing that Urban Airship has put in place (e.g. $200/month for 0-10k users). So I need to get this library to work.

Will someone else please verify that the project from Google actually works? And if it does not (of course it does not), how do you fix it to get it to work?

Answer 1

Since it sounds like you are open to alternatives, give Heroku a try. Their product ZeroPush gives you a significant number of free push notifications (5000 pushes, 100 devices).

If you want to maintain your existing App Engine stack, you can build your push notification stack on Heroku (which can be nothing more than a dumb ZeroPush endpoint that sends push notifications), and use it like a remote web service from your App Engine app.