Every developer is into push messages now. It is a growing business, which grows even more significant because of the seemingly never-ending demand for Android phones by the people. Before, push messages used to be delivered through the Google’s C2DM solution.
Of course, as the needs change, so does the platform server. The world now uses GCM Server. Developers, who had initially been sent their push messages through the old server, must soon migrate to the new Android GCM.
Of course, this release was greeted with mixed reactions. It’s a similar hard choice as for students that choosing between Primetimeessy.com free plagiarism checker and other writing tools. Some don’t like it, but there are others who do. Whichever side a developer may be on the issue, he’d still be forced to migrate to the GCM Server for reasons that he has no choice. If he wants to get left behind with the old application, then by all means, he could stay with C2DM, which cannot accept any more. Of course, no sane developer wants this to happen to him, so he migrates to be able to make new applications.
Of course, the C2DM-based applications are still slated to continue working, but it will never accept quota requests, which is reason enough for the developers to leave it. By not having the capability to take quote requests, there will never be new users of the application, and without further users, the app has no other future left other than to die off.
There are, of course, advantages in migrating to the GCM Server. One of these is that there are no quotas in this server. This means an unlimited number of new users can be added. According to its designers, this will be forever, but how it could be as such remains to be seen. There’s also the availability of push starts, which could be used in the applications released through Google Play.
This allows the developer to understand and monitor the GCM stats. This gives him better access to the number of messages sent every day as well as the number of new devices registered. The Android GCM could also do plain-text and JSON formats through the POST, which is something that can’t be done by C2DM.
This gives the Android GCM the capability to multicast a single message to numerous devices. It could even make a particular device receive messages from other senders. There’s also a higher payload size limit, which is at 4096 bytes. C2Dm only had 1024 bytes. Another reason to migrate is the interoperability of the two servers.
An application that runs on the C2DM will never run in the Android GCM, and vice-versa. It’s like the two have different sets of languages and can never understand each other. Now, this should be enough compelling reasons why developers should migrate. If they do decide to relocate, they will find that this new server is more accessible to work on.
There are only a few issues and problems to be encountered, which is excellent and is something not usually seen in the industry. In fact, even the migration is easy to accomplish. Other than that, there’s also the Helper Libraries, which according to many people is what makes the easy easier.
