It's great that the Parse server got open sourced, no doubt. But a lot of people rely/relied on Parse for sending push notifications... you know, that pesky little item listed as "unsupported" in the parse-server README.
Take a look at the pull requests. Push is landing imminently.
What's the current best option for sending push notifications? Is there an equivalent to Mailgun, SendGrid, Mandrill, SES? UrbanAirship? Does Twilio do it? Or do you just go direct to Apple/Google?
I've had a lot of positive experience with Amazon SNS. It's reasonably priced ($1/million push notifications) and makes sending notifications as easy as hitting an HTTP endpoint. We deliver a couple million notifications a month and have had no problems.
Second that with our experience sending 1m push notifications a day to android/ios
Thirded. It was actually a little annoying getting the message structure right (putting an escaped JSON string inside of JSON isn't the most intuitive thing), but once I got that working it's been smooth sailing.
Why not make a relatively simple node app that hooks up with apples servers? It is (if I recall correctly) a very simple protocol and it is free, even if you send lots of notifications.
We relied on Parse to send push notifications and since the announcement were looking for alternatives. We decided to go with pubnub (which FWIF we were already using for other stuff). I think it's worth for anyone who was using parse to check it out.