How to avoid empty push notification messages in Android - GCM

I’m “rolling my own” push server for Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) and banged my head against the wall for a while.  When I’d send a push notification using PushWoosh the message would come through with a message. When I did it using standard PHP code like the following library, it would come through but it wouldn’t have a message.

https://github.com/mattg888/GCM-PHP-Server-Push-Message

What I discovered was that you want to use “alert” for the body of the message … rather than “message”.  This makes sense since it’s the same as iOS, but it took me a while to figure it out

-Joe