

Urban Airship sends half a billion push notifications - mtrichardson
http://blog.urbanairship.com/2010/06/29/urban-airship-sends-half-a-billion-push-notifications/

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anonymousDan
How exactly does this work? I dug around the website a bit but couldn't get a
clear picture of the basic architecture in my head.

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mtrichardson
(cofounder here)

Since the post is just about Apple push notifications, I'm going to assume
that's what you're asking about.

Apple maintains a persistent connection to every device with push
notifications enabled. An application can show a user a dialog asking whether
or not that user wishes to receive push notifications - if the user says yes,
the application is given a unique identifier called a device token. That
device token can then be used to deliver messages from the developer's server
via a persistent socket connection to Apple using their binary protocol.
According to Apple, this connection should be held open as long as possible -
you can't just open it when you need to send messages. They also don't provide
any grouping or broadcast functionality.

Where we come in (again, on the Apple push side) is allowing that application
to register the device token with us along with any additional information
they might want - tags, aliases, time zones, quiet time information. The
application developer can then send messages through a simple RESTful API
instead of maintaining the persistent connection to Apple. They also get the
benefit of grouping, RSS to Push, scheduled notifications, broadcast messages
and all of the other things we offer.

Our customers love it because not only do we take care of all of the difficult
problems, as well as handling scaling to millions of devices, we provide a lot
of features on top of the basic service. It's a lot of work that they don't
have to implement and, any time that they have questions, they have a team of
experts they can contact.

On top of that, we have AirMail, which allows application developers to use
push notifications to drive users into a richer experience.

