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I'm currently implementing a notification system for our network of sites. Aside from the HTTP microservice, my implementation is about the same. Which isn't much of a surprise - I expect this is a fairly common way of doing it.

With that said, I was surprised to learn how complicated it can be to send notifications cross platform. Fortunately we're targeting the web, so I really only have to worry about two push provider implementations: APNs and VAPID. I really hope Apple agrees to implement VAPID sooner than later so developers can stop wasting their time.

We have used OneSignal in the past, but there's something so satisfying about delivering the notification yourself. Also, a word of caution for people new to push notifications: we discovered early on that sending a million push notifications all at once is a really good way of crashing your site, as they have a surprisingly high click through rate in the first minute of sending!



Why not use Amazon SNS? They abstract away the differences between APNS and whatever Google are calling their push infrastructure these days.




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