

Ask HN: iPhone Push Notifications using Urban Airship? - tmpk

I want to add push notification capability to my iPhone app, and I am considering using Urban Airship's service versus directly building on APNS. Can someone who has added push notification to his iPhone app, comment on the pros and cons of each approach, or provide alternative suggestions. Thanks!
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idan
Hey there. I've used Urban Airship with client projects, and have been
extremely satisfied. I don't work for UA, but I do know one of the founders,
in the spirit of full disclosure.

UA's API for push notifications is best described as the API Apple should have
provided for APNS. At first blush, it doesn't seem to add a lot of
functionality -- but once you spend some time with the API, you realize that
the UA folks put a lot of engineering effort into making your life easy.
Feedback service? Much easier. Push to a group of devices? Yes. Device
tagging? Yes. Scalability? Not your problem. Easy-to-use control panel for
debugging during development? Yes. Getting started with UA literally took me
all of five minutes from installation of the python UA client library to first
device registered & notification sent.

Given how little they cost (recently lowered prices, too) and how much
potential headache they take off your plate, I would warmly recommend them. I
briefly considered a "build-it-myself" approach, but scalability questions
made it an easy decision. The first 250k messages are free (IIRC), and if you
get to the point where you are actually sending a million messages a month --
you probably have enough revenue to cover the $1-2k in UA fees. There's no
contract, so there's nothing preventing you from DIY when it makes financial
sense to leave UA.

To top it all off, the UA team is friendly and responsive.

I haven't used their in-app purchase framework yet, so I can't speak to that.

Hope this helps!

~~~
tmpk
Thanks for sharing the info!

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jdg
I created Boxcar (<http://boxcar.io>), which has sent out 58 million push
notifications. I've talked to every push notification provider out there, and
the guys from UA are the best at what they do.

Without a moment of hesitation, I would strongly recommend choosing them over
rolling your own. They're great guys, know what they're doing, and are having
fun doing it.

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sil3ntmac
Rolling your own solution isn't too tough, provided you have a server
somewhere that has the correct ports open. Just takes a bit of work:
regenerating device profiles and setting up the PHP script (there's some code
floating around out there that will do what you want), but once it's setup,
it's not a problem to maintain.

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jasonlbaptiste
check out apppush.com My best friend is the cofounder and the tech behind it
is beautiful. They're currently privately beta testing. if you want in, just
email me and ill gladly make the intro: j@jasonlbaptiste.com

