title: Why use Third Party Push Notification Providers over GCM
body: <p>I am an android developer ....have made a few apps...but for the first time had a chance to implement push notifications for one of my apps... After looking for a number of solutions including Amazon SNS, Pushbots, Pushy, Parse etc.I was wondering on why there are a lot of popular third party services...</p>
  
  <p>If they implement the same GCM. GCM also provides a dashboard with tracking and topic based notifications.</p>
  
  <p>Is there any disadvantage if I am using GCM directly. <strong>Also a big question... most of the push services only offer sending notification to apps</strong>... what if I need to trigger notification from my android app. Does GCM supports this. What are the best solutions for implementing this.</p>