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.