Notification Hubs in Azure offers a push notification service to send notifications from backends to mobile devices. Push notifications on mobile devices are usually displayed to a user in a pop-up or dialog box. Users can then decide whether they want to view or dismiss the message. You can use push notifications for various scenarios, such as sending codes for MFA, sending notifications from social media, and sending news. Notification Hubs offers cross-platform notifications by offering a set of SDKs and APIs for iOS, Android, and Windows devices. Normally, applications will use Platform Notification Systems (PNSes), which are dedicated infrastructure platforms. Apple has the Apple Push Notification service, and Windows has the Windows Notification service, for instance.

Notification Hubs removes all the complexity that comes with calling the different PNSes manually in your applications because it offers platform independence by offering a single API, massive scaling, a variety of delivery patterns, rich telemetry, and more.

In the next section, we are going to cover Azure IoT Hub.