Register a device on GCM every time the app start is the right approach?

Question

I am developing a phonegap app and followed this tutorial to implement PushPlugin. However, it says to register the app every time deviceready event is triggered. This means that it'll register the device on GCM even if it'd been previously registered.

This made me a little bit uncomfortable as it doesn't seem to be a good practice, since the device was already registered, so, I decided to come here to ask. Is this a good practice? If not, why? Do this have some long term complication?

Answer 1

In our application we have found this to be a good practice for several reasons:

1. The API for registering the device returns a token that represents that device. From what I could see, GCM does not guarantee that the token will remain valid indefinitely. Thus failure to register could lead to expiration of your device token.

2. Registering with GCM, makes the service aware that your device is active. From what we observed, devices recently registered with GCM seemed to receive push notifications fastest. That is, given 2 devices, one recently registered (Device A), and the other that had last registered several days ago (Device B), Device A would always receive push notifications faster - often minutes before Device B. This is simply what we observed.