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Or, if you use Urban Airship; it's literally like five lines of code with HTTParty to send a push notification.

Of course, your needs may vary, but UA scales well and is essentially free to start with.

I was just looking at options for push notifications in ruby. I found a gem called apn_on_rails (https://github.com/PRX/apn_on_rails) which sort of worked. But I didn't know how to keep persistent connections and was afraid of accidentally spamming Apple's servers. I thought about outsource the problem to Urban Airship, but unfortunately their free service only works for 45 days then costs hundreds of dollars a month. Grocer looks really interesting and I'd definitely want to try it out.

You scared me there for a minute. I thought they'd dropped their free plan. Turns out it still exists: https://go.urbanairship.com/accounts/register/

There's another gem you should take a look at, too, called 'rapns'. The maintainer is pretty active with fixes and it maintains persistent connections with a daemon.

Oh yeah I've heard great things about Urban Airship. Also I noticed a new heroku add-on that looks pretty nifty as well.

https://addons.heroku.com/boxcar

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