Azure mobile services is a great platform for mobile developers to quickly create backend services for their applications to store data and create custom APIs to interact with their own data or external resources via HTTP. Along with data and custom APIs, there is great support for push notifications, and there are push notification service APIs for all the major platforms. Mobile services also have fine-grained authorization control that allows different authorization levels to be applied to individual service methods and more recently, support for custom authorization providers.

Mobile services have benefits over other service types such as Web API, WCF, and services on other platforms because of the flexible authorization model, notifications' integration, and also excellent SDKs for taking care of authorization with built-in OAuth workflow and table and API-specific data access methods.

Azure mobile services can be used by pretty much any mobile platform...