PubNub Now Supports Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) for Android

2 min readJul 9, 2014

PubNub Mobile Push Gateway makes delivering real-time mobile push notifications to iOS and Android devices fast and easy. Today, we’re pleased to announce that PubNub Mobile Push Gateway now supports Google Cloud Messaging (GCM).

You can now easily build GCM/Android push notifications into your PubNub application, streamlining cross-platform message delivery and eliminating the need to develop additional server-side components for GCM.

GCM PubNub Mobile Push Notifications

So what do we mean by easier?

To start, you now don’t have to worry about developing additional server-side components for GCM. In addition to publishing messages with PubNub directly to iPhones, iPads, and iPods via APNS, you can also publish to all Android devices using our Mobile Push Gateway for GCM.

The PubNub Mobile Push Gateway acts as the provider between subscriber devices of all kinds and 3rd party services, enabling you to instantly deliver mobile push notifications in parallel to Android devices.

Want to learn more? Our PubNub Android GCM documentation or JavaScript GCM documentation gives you everything you need to know about push notifications with Google Cloud Messaging including:

  • Overview and architecture of GCM and PubNub
  • Preparing your Android development environment
  • Preparing your PubNub environment
  • Building a working application
  • Testing your application
PubNub GCM Mobile Push Notifications

GCM, like APNS, is great for one-way, non-mission critical communication of trivial (128b to 4Kb) message lengths.

However, for mission-critical, bi-directional communication that must be reliable, guaranteed, and delivered in real-time with message lengths of up to 32Kb, we recommend using PubNub Data Streams.

Let us know what you think by tweeting us at @PubNub, and if you need any additional support, contact support@pubnub.com!

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