Develop push notifications for iOS app

COMPANY INTRODUCTION "The Local Europe" is a company which publishes nine separate news websites in Europe. We have a site called "The Local Sweden" and another called "The Local Germany", and so on for nine different countries. You can use Google to see them. We also have an iOS app which displays the news from these sites. You can search it on the Apple iTunes store. DEVELOPMENT WORK REQUIRED We would like to use push notifications so that our journalists can send breaking news alerts to users of our app. This feature was already half-way developed, but it never worked properly. It also used [login to view URL] to manage sending the notifications, but we now have more users than our UrbanAirship free account allows. So we would now like to use a custom solution. We will develop the server-side code ourselves. This will work using PHP on our web server. We will build a web-based user interface to send the notifications to Apple's Push Notification Service (APNS). We need an iOS developer for the client side code, so that push notifications can be received on iOS devices from the APNS. When a notification is received, it should carry the headline of the news article, and tapping the headline should open our app at the relevant news page. FURTHER DETAILS If you wish to see all the code for the existing iOS app, please send me your GitHub username and I will grant you access to our repository there. You will probably have further questions about this project, so please don't hesitate to ask. I imagine we will communicate a few emails back and forth before we agree for work to begin. OUR BUDGET Our budget is flexible and could also be outside the bounds specified on this advert. Please give us a realistic estimate of how long this development might take, including a breakdown of tasks, then tell us your hourly rate. If you need further details before an estimate is possible, please ask. If this project is successful, there is a possibility for ongoing further development of the app, including maybe even a complete re-write.