Sending long Cyrillic push notifications on iPhone?

Question

iPhone

Faced such a problem when implementing push notifications.
It's no secret that the payload when sending a push notification cannot exceed 256 bytes (the total weight of the JSON that is sent to the apple server)
The problem is that when we json_encode a string containing Cyrillic, we get something like

{
    "aps":
          {
               "alert":"\u0412 \u0415\u043a\u0430\u0442\u0435\u0440\u0438\u043d\u0431\u0443\u0440\u0433\u0435 \u043e\u0442\u043a\u0440\u044b\u043b\u0441\u044f \u0444\u0440\u0430\u043d\u0448...",
               "sound":"default"
          },
     "message-type":"new-news"
}

That is, each Cyrillic character is encoded in 6 bytes, which significantly reduces the amount of possible payload in a PUSH message. How do you get around this limitation?

Answer 1

As far as I know, in JSON you can write directly in Cyrillic in UTF8. In this case, you will only need 2 bytes per character.
At least JS and PHP handle such JSON very well. I assume there will be an iPhone too.

Answer 2

After all, you can pass the key for the localizable string and separately the arguments for it - this does not help to save money?