Parse vs. StackMob vs. other for push notifications service?

You must Login before you can answer or comment on any questions.

We have a very basic application (iOS/Android) done in Appcelerator that will receive a single update every week. This update will be sent to all the users subscribed to the push notifications service.

By this moment, we have around 35k installs but 7,000 active users on this application on last month. We've been evaluating two services for all the push notifications:

  • StackMob
  • Parse

Appcelerator Cloud services is fine, but we're not willing to pay that much. Parse and StackMob prices are lower than Appcelerator Cloud services and by our analysis, we could even use the free service on both services (StackMob = 60k push notifications + 60k api calls, and Parse 1M api calls + 1M pushes).

If we're going to use Parse, we'll need to buy the Android and iOS module from the Marketplace ($30/year each). Which is fine. On the counterpart, I think we could use the REST API on StackMob for subscribing to the push service.

Questions:

  • What are your thoughts on both services? Which one do you prefer and why?
  • Have you used StackMob REST API for subscribing to push notifications?
  • How do you retrieve Android's token?
  • Is there any (cost effective) alternative to these services? I also reviewed PubNub, which seems to be great but costs are higher than StackMob and Parse.

Thanks in advance.

4 Answers

Tried the parse api for android yesterday to evaluate the push notification implementation, worked great. For the price, well worth it. Going that way. Same issue as you for acs pricing...just too much for what I'm trying to do.

Parse.com is my first choice for iOS push notification. 200k+ users without problems ;)

As alternative there is also http://www.appoxee.com, unlimited push notifications for free every month.

BTW: Pubnub does not send native push notifications, this is a cloud based socket stream provider.

— answered 9 months ago by Danny Pham
answer permalink
1 Comment

  • Hello Danny, thanks for your response. One question: is there any available SDK for Appcelerator (or any REST API) for Appoxee? I made a search for a while and it seems I'll need to create my own SDK for both: Android and iOS, just wanted to recheck.

    Thanks in advance.

    — commented 9 months ago by Demostenes Garcia

To all who tried the parse api, both on ios and android, do you use the titanium module, or you manage to use the parse api directly with javascript?

— answered 9 months ago by BSoft Co
answer permalink
5 Comments

  • Can only speak for iOS. Pure javascript without custom module. A user has posted a snippet in another thread some weeks ago: https://gist.github.com/3761738

    — commented 9 months ago by Danny Pham

  • Great, that's what i was looking for! :) Because, like you, titanium ACS push prices are really toooooo extensives!

    — commented 9 months ago by BSoft Co

  • You can register for push notifications on ios using the JavaScript api, however I don't believe there is a way to do the same for android. There doesn't seem to be any other way but the native api. The parse module in the marketplace provides an api wrapper, worked right out of the box, and kept me from having to figure out how to build/compile/test my own...well worth the $$.

    — commented 9 months ago by Ray Belisle

  • Show 2 more comments

Hi Everyone,

Full Disclosure: I'm the Platform Evangelist for StackMob.

I wanted to chime in and point you to some StackMob references around Appcelerator.

Aaron Saunders has several projects on github showing how to use StackMob with Appcelerator. https://github.com/aaronksaunders

He also wrote a series of blog posts about it. http://developer.appcelerator.com/blog/2011/11/titanium-appcelerator-quickie-stackmob-api-module-part-one.html

Our REST API reference is available at https://developer.stackmob.com/tutorials/dashboard/REST-API-Reference

One of the big differentiators between StackMob and others is our custom code option. You can write your own logic in Java, Scala or Clojure and host it on StackMob. The custom code can interact with your data and other 3rd party APIs.

https://developer.stackmob.com/tutorials/custom%20code

We are very supportive of community created SDKs, modules, libraries, what have you. We've had several created, including Sencha, AS3, Unity, etc. Would love to collaborate with anyone who wants to implement a StackMob module for the Appcelerator Marketplace. Of course, it would be yours to monetize. :-)

Your Answer

Think you can help? Login to answer this question!