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You have probably heard a lot of talk about the wonderful things the cloud can do for you, and you are probably curious about how those services may come into play in your daily life. If this sounds like you, then you need to know that cloud services are playing an increasingly important role in our lives, and we need to look at how they can change how we message one another.
Many people are looking at Android cloud messaging as the next leap forward into a future where it is possible to reach out to the people we care about and save those messages directly in the cloud. Never miss the opportunity to communicate with someone who truly matters to you, and start using cloud storage to back up your messages. It is as simple as that!
You might have heard of c2dm (cloud-to-device messaging), which basically allowed third-party applications to send (push) lightweight messages to their android applications. Well, c2dm as such is now deprecated and replaced with its successor up the evolutionary ladder: GCM, or google cloud messaging.
GCM is a (free) service that allows developers to push two types of messages from their application servers to any number of android devices registered with the service:
collapsible, «send-to-sync» messages
non-collapsible messages with a payload up to 4k in size
«collapsible» means that the most recent message overwrites the previous one. A «send-to-sync» message is used to notify a mobile application to sync its data with the server.
