Push Notifications in Android Platform

Question

I am looking to write an app that receives pushed alerts from a server. I found a couple of methods to do this.

1. SMS - Intercept the incoming SMS and initiate

Answer 1

I dont know if this is still useful. I achieved something like this with a java library at http://www.pushlets.com/

Althoug doing it in a service won't prevent android from shutting it down an killing the listener thread.