
The problem with push: can small developers afford it? - naish
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/04/the-problem-with-push-can-small-developers-afford-it.ars
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mattmaroon
The easy solution here is to just charge $1 for your app. Then if 1m people
download it, you can afford to deal with it.

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patio11
Some combination of cash and cache can solve just about every performance
problem I've ever heard about.

(Incidentally: if you are creating a service which will be used over the long
term and which provides value, you should not be pricing it anywhere near $1.)

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comatose_kid
Unless that value is predicated by the number of people using it...

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mcav
The author seems to confuse push with polling:

> _Consider an application with just 10,000 users. It might service a million
> uses per day, assuming update checks every 15 minutes. More time-critical
> uses might demand checks every few minutes or even several times a minute.
> As the computational burden builds, so do the hosting costs. While cloud
> computing provides an excellent match to these kinds of needs, that kind of
> solution comes with a real price in development, maintenance, and day-to-day
> operations._

With push, small developers are _saved_ from the hassle of handling lots of
polling connections. They just push according to what their application needs
-- it's _more_ scalable, and that's the point.

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wmf
It depends. Consider the prototypical iPhone app, the Twitter client. AFAIK,
the Twitter API only supports polling, but the iPhone only supports push for
background notifications. Thus the app developer is left to build (and pay
for) a polling/pushing adaptor.

Somebody like Gnip could make good money here.

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tesseract
Or consider an instant messaging client - incoming messages are pushed from
the IM service, but not directly to the iPhone in the format it understands,
so the app developer would have to operate a server that maintains an open
connection to the IM server for each app user and forwards incoming messages
to their iPhones.

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collint
It really is a good thing that multiple pieces of software exsists for doing
just such a thing.

Modern messaging middleware can handle in the range of hundreds of thousands
of messages per second.

Talent and domain knowledge will be important, but iPhone "push" changes
little.

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jdg
Something I've been musing over for the last few days has been whether or not
this will help raise prices in the app store.

Or will "push" be an add-on, purchased for $4.99/mo/yr via the new in-app
store.

As cstejerean said, "no shit, servers cost money."

In any event, there are new ways coming to make your money back. Ars may be
looking at this within the context of the current app store. Looking at it
from what _will_ be available in the near future changes the game a bit more.

I for one will be raising prices on my apps, whether that cost is up front or
via an in-app purchase after a short trial. We're not selling apps to lose
money.

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rs
Webhooks are an example of easily implemented "push" tech

<http://webhooks.pbwiki.com/>

