Azure Notification Hubs

Azure Notification Hubs provide an easy-to-use and scaled-out push engine that enables you to send notifications to any platform (iOS, Android, Windows, etc.) from any back-end (cloud or on-premises). Notification Hubs works great for both enterprise and consumer scenarios. Here are a few example scenarios:

• Send breaking news notifications to millions with low latency.

• Send location-based coupons to interested user segments.

• Send event-related notifications to users or groups for media/sports/finance/gaming applications.

• Push promotional content to applications to engage and market to customers.

• Notify users of enterprise events such as new messages and work items.

• Send codes for multi-factor authentication.

What are push notifications?

Push notifications are a form of app-to-user communication where users of mobile apps are notified of certain desired information, usually in a pop-up or dialog box on a mobile device. Users generally choose to view or dismiss the message; choosing the former opens the mobile application that communicated the notification. Some notifications are silent - delivered behind the scenes for the app to process and decide what to do.

Push notifications are vital for consumer apps in increasing app engagement and usage, and for enterprise apps in communicating up-to-date business information. It's the best app-to-user communication because it is energy-efficient for mobile devices, flexible for the notifications senders, and available when corresponding applications are not active.

Fast broadcast to millions of devices

Azure Notification Hubs is a massively scalable mobile push notification engine for quickly sending millions of notifications to iOS, Android, Windows or Kindle devices, working with APNs (Apple Push Notification service), GCM (Google Cloud Messaging), WNS (Windows Push Notification Service), MPNS (Microsoft Push Notification Service) and more. Tailor your notifications to specific customers—or entire audiences—with just a few lines of code and do it across any platform.

Works with any back end

Notification Hubs is flexible enough to plug into any back end—Microsoft .NET, PHP, Java, Node.js—whether it is located on-premises or in the cloud. This makes it easier to instantly update your mobile apps and engage your customers.