Mobile Push Notifications Overview

Mobile push notifications allow Force.com mobile application developers to easily push notifications to their users’ mobile devices when business events occur in the users’ organizations.

Salesforce push notifications leverage the connected app framework and support customer apps built in-house as well as partner/ISV apps installed via managed packages.

Business events in the user’s organization are trapped using Apex triggers that specify the notification message payload and recipient users.  The push notifications feature hands off notifications to services operated by the device OS vendors, such as Apple or Google, for eventual delivery to user mobile devices.

To handle events that can’t be caught by Apex triggers, the push notifications resource of the Chatter REST API provides an alternative mechanism.