

Urban Airship's AirMail takes push notifications to the next level - thiele
http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/22/found-footage-urban-airships-airmail-takes-push-notifications/

======
mtrichardson
Thanks for the submission!

I'm one of the cofounders of Urban Airship - I'd be more than happy to answer
any questions if you have any.

~~~
pxlpshr
Just want to say thanks for doing such a fantastic job with Urban Airship.
We're using it for our app and it's proven to be extremely valuable and has
saved us loads of time, we'll have no problem paying when we exceed our usage.
:) Really looking forward to implementing AirMail too, can we sign up for
early access anywhere?

One minor issue I've experienced is that push notifications sometimes never
make it to the phone -- since UA/Apple doesn't return deliverability or system
status, there's an inexplainable black hole and this is important given the
nature of our app and potential consequences for failing to receive a notice.

I assume this type of integrity is related to why you've released AirMail? Is
the deliverability failure largely an issue w/ Apple's push/queue system or
UA's?

~~~
mtrichardson
Awesome, thanks for using UA!

At the bottom of <http://urbanairship.com/products/airmail/> , there's a
signup form - we'll be emailing that list first with early access. Or, you can
email me ( michael@urbanairship.com ) and I can get you on the list.

Apple's push service has a few quirks - in addition to connectivity issues
(which can definitely be numerous - thanks AT&T!), there's also a problem when
passing along a development device token to a production server. They'll
silently drop the connection and we won't know until the TCP window size fills
up that this happened - in other words, messages can be lost. There's a
feature we've implemented called push debug mode that will watch for this, but
it will slow down broadcasts or large sends. We recommend having this on
during testing and are working on a more automated solution. So, you could try
that.

But, in general, yes, issues like this were some of the initial inspiration
behind AirMail - we tried as much as possible to talk to our customers and get
feedback and the product naturally grew out of hearing what they wanted.

------
jrockway
I thought about writing something like this for Android, but after thinking
about it more, I don't see the point. My IMAP client can IDLE, so I get new
messages (and a notification) instantly. Twidroid could (but doesn't) long-
poll and get instant notifications too. GTalk is also push.

The only thing that I can't do on Android right now is get irc notifications
without being connected to my irc proxy. This was why I was originally going
to write something like this, but the problem is that no service is going to
get private messages properly. Unless it is run on each server (doubt Freenode
is going to let me bug their network), or the user runs their own client, it
is simply not workable. Not workable == nobody paying for my service == don't
really care.

So I don't really see the point of this sort of app.

~~~
jcapote
No point for it on the android platform, that is.

------
dschobel
So would this compete against the likes of notifo (the YC company)?

~~~
mtrichardson
No - a Notifo or Prowl or other similar services could use us to deliver their
notifications. They are enabling push on web apps and other items and creating
a consumer app that serves as a central point for the notifications, whereas
we provide a service for any app developer to integrate. Different targets and
concepts :)

