Publishing Amazon SNS notifications with platform-specific payloads - Amazon Simple Notification Service
Sending JSON-formatted messagesSending platform-specific messagesSending messages to an application on multiple platformsSending messages to APNs as alert or background notifications

Publishing Amazon SNS notifications with platform-specific payloads

You can use the AWS Management Console or Amazon SNS APIs to send custom messages with platform-specific payloads to mobile devices. For information about using the Amazon SNS APIs, see Mobile push API actions and the SNSMobilePush.java file in snsmobilepush.zip.

Topics

Sending JSON-formatted messages

When you send platform-specific payloads, the data must be formatted as JSON key-value pair strings, with the quotation marks escaped.

The following examples show a custom message for the FCM platform.

{
"GCM": "{\"fcmV1Message\": {\"message\": {\"notification\": {\"title\": \"Hello\", \"body\": \"This is a test.\"}, \"data\": {\"dataKey\": \"example\"}}}}"
}

Sending platform-specific messages

In addition to sending custom data as key-value pairs, you can send platform-specific key-value pairs.

The following example shows the inclusion of the FCM parameters time_to_live and collapse_key after the custom data key-value pairs in the FCM data parameter.

{
"GCM": "{\"fcmV1Message\": {\"message\": {\"notification\": {\"title\": \"TitleTest\", \"body\": \"Sample message for Android or iOS endpoints.\"}, \"data\":{\"time_to_live\": 3600,\"collapse_key\":\"deals\"}}}}"
}

For a list of the key-value pairs supported by each of the push notification services supported in Amazon SNS, see the following:

Important

Amazon SNS now supports Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) HTTP v1 API for sending mobile push notifications to Android devices.

March 26, 2024 – Amazon SNS supports FCM HTTP v1 API for Apple devices and Webpush destinations. We recommend that you migrate your existing mobile push applications to the latest FCM HTTP v1 API on or before June 1, 2024 to avoid application disruption.

Sending messages to an application on multiple platforms

To send a message to an application installed on devices for multiple platforms, such as FCM and APNs, you must first subscribe the mobile endpoints to a topic in Amazon SNS and then publish the message to the topic.

The following example shows a message to send to subscribed mobile endpoints on APNs, FCM, and ADM: 

{ 
  "default": "This is the default message which must be present when publishing a message to a topic. The default message will only be used if a message is not present for 
one of the notification platforms.",     
  "APNS": "{\"aps\":{\"alert\": \"Check out these awesome deals!\",\"url\":\"www.amazon.com\"} }",
  "GCM": "{\"data\":{\"message\":\"Check out these awesome deals!\",\"url\":\"www.amazon.com\"}}",
  "ADM": "{\"data\":{\"message\":\"Check out these awesome deals!\",\"url\":\"www.amazon.com\"}}" 
}

Sending messages to APNs as alert or background notifications

Amazon SNS can send messages to APNs as alert or background notifications (for more information, see Pushing Background Updates to Your App in the APNs documentation).

  • An alert APNs notification informs the user by displaying an alert message, playing a sound, or adding a badge to your application’s icon.

  • A background APNs notification wakes up or instructs your application to act upon the content of the notification, without informing the user.

Specifying custom APNs header values

We recommend specifying custom values for the AWS.SNS.MOBILE.APNS.PUSH_TYPE reserved message attribute using the Amazon SNS Publish API action, AWS SDKs, or the AWS CLI. The following CLI example sets content-available to 1 and apns-push-type to background for the specified topic. 

aws sns publish \
--endpoint-url https://sns.us-east-1.amazonaws.com \
--target-arn arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789012:endpoint/APNS_PLATFORM/MYAPP/1234a567-bc89-012d-3e45-6fg7h890123i \
--message '{"APNS_PLATFORM":"{\"aps\":{\"content-available\":1}}"}' \
--message-attributes '{ \
  "AWS.SNS.MOBILE.APNS.TOPIC":{"DataType":"String","StringValue":"com.amazon.mobile.messaging.myapp"}, \
  "AWS.SNS.MOBILE.APNS.PUSH_TYPE":{"DataType":"String","StringValue":"background"}, \
  "AWS.SNS.MOBILE.APNS.PRIORITY":{"DataType":"String","StringValue":"5"}}' \
--message-structure json
Note

Ensure that the JSON structure is valid. Add a comma after each key-value pair, except the last one.

Inferring the APNs push type header from the payload

If you don't set the apns-push-type APNs header, Amazon SNS sets header to alert or background depending on the content-available key in the aps dictionary of your JSON-formatted APNs payload configuration.

Note

Amazon SNS is able to infer only alert or background headers, although the apns-push-type header can be set to other values.

  • apns-push-type is set to alert

    • If the aps dictionary contains content-available set to 1 and one or more keys that trigger user interactions.

    • If the aps dictionary contains content-available set to 0 or if the content-available key is absent.

    • If the value of the content-available key isn’t an integer or a Boolean.

  • apns-push-type is set to background

    • If the aps dictionary only contains content-available set to 1 and no other keys that trigger user interactions.

      Important

      If Amazon SNS sends a raw configuration object for APNs as a background-only notification, you must include content-available set to 1 in the aps dictionary. Although you can include custom keys, the aps dictionary must not contain any keys that trigger user interactions (for example, alerts, badges, or sounds).

The following is an example raw configuration object.

{
  "APNS": "{\"aps\":{\"content-available\":1},\"Foo1\":\"Bar\",\"Foo2\":123}"
}

In this example, Amazon SNS sets the apns-push-type APNs header for the message to background. When Amazon SNS detects that the apn dictionary contains the content-available key set to 1—and doesn't contain any other keys that can trigger user interactions—it sets the header to background.