Cross platform push notifications

Posted in: Blog, Mobile by openhanced on February 9, 2010

I think the iPhone push notifications offer an excellent way to make direct messaging possible between users and it is a shame that this only works on the iPhone (of course, Apple).

However, recently I discovered a few interesting articles on something called MQTT (MQ Telemetry Transport). This is a product developed by IBM and in July 2009 Andy Stanford-Clark from IBM expected it to explode. Well, that obviously did not happen yet

What is MQTT?
The MQTT protocol enables a publish/subscribe messaging model in an extremely lightweight way. It is useful for connections with remote locations where a small code footprint is required and/or network bandwidth is at a premium. For example, it has been used in remote sensors communicating to a broker via satellite.

If you now go to the site you can already see that what Andy predicted did not happen, the latest news is from July 2009.

However, a few people have written solutions around MQTT and it seems to work excellent. Dale Lane has done some work on an Android implementation and he has also written an extensive article on it here.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could easily exchange information between devices (without the overhead of Twitter) cross platform?

Wait a minute, isn’t that what Twitter is doing? Yeah, I guess Twitter can be used for that if the message is 140 characters. However, most Twitter apps. are based on pull.