We want to use push notifications to inform our users about new app features or great content. These will only be sent occasionally, but should go to all users of our app.
We've already implemented push notifications and calculate the badge number based on server side. This works fine when sending push notifications as transactional information (e.g. somebody has followed you), but if we send them to thousands or millions of users, obtaining and sending the badge count as payload seems to be crazy.
This would actually result not only in one database lookup for every user, but also for thousands (or millions) of calls to APN.
From what I found in the docs, I don't see any way around this, also because you have to keep the badge count in sync with your own data. So, if so many calls to APN are actually necessary, what is the best practice to do these calls? All in one giant burst, or maybe send smaller chunks (like 1.000 at a time) and then pause for a minute?! I can't find any recommendation on Apple's pages on how to handle this and what they expect.
