Is it strictly necessary to use Urban Airship SDK on the device

Question

We have an app on android and iOS that is currently getting tokens directly from GCM/APN and passing that to our servers. Our servers send messages directly to the GCM/APN notification servers. We want to migrate to Urban Airship without changing the clients at all. I can imagine this would be technically possible by having our servers forward the APN/GCM token to Urban Airship on behalf of the client device since we get the token anyway. UA only needs the APN/GCM token, so it shouldn't matter if the device is sending it to them or that our server is sending it, as long as they get the token. I assume their servers will send us back a second UA token, which is what we use from then on to send messages via UA.

So instead of this:

Device --> 
  UA-SDK -> 
     Get-APN-Token
     Register-With-UA
  Register-With-Our-Servers    

Can we instead do this:

Device -->
  Get-APN-Token
  Register-With-Our-Servers -->
      Register-With-UA

The key difference being that only our servers are interacting with Urban Airship and the client doesn't care.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

It wouldn't be possible because UA's SDK also generates something called an APID to use as a unique identifier on Android, which is stored device-side to enable push notifications. The APID is used by UA for all interactions with the device.

That's why also no server-side method exists for creating APIDs.

The SDK will be the best route. It's actually a pretty straightforward, simple integration, though: http://docs.urbanairship.com/build/android.html

Cheers, -B