[Cthulhu_]

That reminds me of a project we did years ago for a large Dutch public transit company. We built an app with push notifications, and sometimes they needed to do big announcements to all users. We made our push notification back-end poll an RSS feed from their CMS every minute or so, if there was a new one on there it would get broadcast to all users.

It... wasn't ideal though, in hindsight we should've hacked together a UI so that the people sending the message could confirm the message and see how many people would be receiving it first. There have been a few Incidents of accidental test messages sent out. One was my fault, early on, because production and test were the same machine. The other was the operators' fault, but by then the app had two million installations and it caused a bit of a social media storm that day (#hajo).

It was funny to see that one play out, and how quickly there are print companies making and advertising merchandise about whatever is trending on twitter that day.

[mongrelion]

Oh man I remember this! Seeing the test notification message popping up on my colleague's phone. Damn. That must have hurt!