While it might be obvious to some, I still frequently find clients confused about the type of messaging Azure Notification Hubs provides. In this post, I thought I would tackle that by clarifying what it does not provide.
First of all, like the title suggests, Azure Notification Hubs does not itself provide SMS text messaging to mobile devices.
What it does provide is in-app, push notifications. In other words, your recipients need to have your mobile app installed on their device before they can receive notifications. There is often confusion on this with because the SMS and push notifications are often used together in a solution and obviously both target the mobile device. They key difference is that SMS text messages will arrive to intended device without an app pre-install. To send SMS text messages from Azure, for example, you can use services like Twilio which is available in the Azure Marketplace. You can use Twilio Connector as an API App (for example that you can invoke from Logic Apps) or your can use the Twilio API directly.
Second of all, Notification Hubs is not for back end messaging like Azure Queues, Service Bus Brokered Messaging (Queues and Topics) or Event Hubs. It is used for the explicit purpose of sending push notifications from your solution to an app installed on a device, and it does a great job of abstracting away the peculiarities of each device's push notification system (e.g., Apple APNS, Google GCM, etc.).
Now that we're clear on that, go use Xamarin to build an awesome app and send your notifications to it using Notification Hubs already- in case you haven't heard Xamarin is now free to Visual Studio users.
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