What's the point? Why not just forward a message to XMPP, Telegram, WhatsApp or email? You know, to the app users actually use. Why make them install one more quasi-messenger?
Because it is the most inefficient approach possible. You either have potentially long delays before receiving a notification (if you poll service once an hour, average delay would be 30 minutes), or you do LOTS of polling, draining the battery/abusing the service. If you have 20 notifications / day and you check service every minute, in a day you'll make 24*60 poll requests, only 1,38% of which would yield some meaningful payload.
And yet, this is exactly how push notifications are implemented on mobile phones. You have the illusion to push a message from server to device while in fact you also push a message onto a queue that is polled at regular intervals by the mobile. No way around it, mobile devices don't have guaranteed connectivity as servers do.
From the Apple Developers Documentation [1], "On initial launch of your app on a user’s device, the system automatically establishes an accredited, encrypted, and persistent IP connection between your app and APNs."
This persistent connection is, in fact, an XMPP session (likely, a modified one) [2].
> No way around it, mobile devices don't have guaranteed connectivity as servers do.
Not sure what "guaranteed connectivity" has to do with it, your phone is connected to network ~90% of the time, and when it is, it has a socket connection with the Google Cloud Messaging API (or iPhone equivalient) which pushes down data as it comes into the queue. If messages come in while you're disconnected, you get them all the next time data is pushed.
My occupation is not really relevant here, but yes, such service could be coded in maybe 60 minutes tops to accept a JSON and forward it to XMPP, and it would be way more efficient. Don't like XMPP? Ok, make a Telegram bot and receive notification with it.
This would be nice for websites and services users want to get push notifications from. I get that html5 notifications should be able to do this at some point but there is still merit in having another way of getting stuff to your phone and possibly desktop.
Do you realize that's the opposite direction of this? In that case you SEND something to a chat app, but this app can RECEIVE data from a web service. Way simpler architecture.
> Do you realize that's the opposite direction of this? In that case you SEND something to a chat app, but this app can RECEIVE data from a web service. Way simpler architecture.
Well, it receives data by hitting a specific endpoint with a specific protocol. It’s “simpler” in that it may be easier to implement, but you still have to modify your service to get that to work. And if you must modify your service, you may want to implement something that’s better supported and doesn’t require users to install (and configure) yet another app.