Does Android support near real time push notification

Posted by j pimmel on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by j pimmel
Published on 2009-08-07T05:42:02Z Indexed on 2010/04/16 11:13 UTC
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I recently learned about the ability of iPhone apps to receive nearly instantaneous notifications to apps.

This is provided in the form of push notifications, a bespoke protocol which keeps an always on data connection to the iPhone and messages binary packets to the app, which pops up alerts incredibly quickly, between 0.5 - 5 seconds from server app send to phone app response time. This is sent as data - rather than SMS - in very very small packets charged as part of the data plan not as incoming messages.

I would like to know if using Android there is either a similar facility, or whether it's possible to implement something close to this using Android APIs. To clarify I define similar as:

Not an SMS message, but some data driven solution
As real time as is possible
Is scalable - ie: as the server part of a mobile app, I could notify thousands of app instances in seconds

I appreciate the app could be pull based, HTTP request/response style, but ideally I don't want to to be polling that heavily just to check for notification .. besides which it's like drip draining the data plan.

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