

Urban Airship Brings Easy Push Notifications To Android - mtrichardson
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/10/urban-airship-brings-easy-push-notifications-to-android/

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mtrichardson
There a couple Urban Airship cofounders that read HN, myself included - please
don't hesitate to ask us any questions. This has been a really, really fun
project with some very interesting technology coming out of it.

~~~
guelo
Couldn't find any Android info on your site. I can think of a ton of
questions, here are some off the top of my head.

* Are you just doing polling or did you figure out some TCP keep-alive tricks to keep the connection open?

* If doing keep-alive do you try to adapt your pings to compensate for different timeouts on different carrier networks and deal with half-open connections as Google claims they do with c2dm?

* Have you measured your battery usage? What is it like?

* How many connections can your servers handle?

* What is the Android library like. Is it a separate app that you communicate with via AIDL?

* Does your app handle the notification or does it just broadcast an Intent?

* Are the packets encrypted?

~~~
schmichael
Another Urban Airshipper here. Just wanted to expound upon the TCP keep-alive
issue because I was the most vocal proponent of using them vs. reinventing
them ourselves.

The main reason using TCP keep-alives were a non-starter was because in our
testing, carriers handled them in "special" ways which usually meant they
rarely or never actually reach ed the intended endpoint.

Another strike against TCP keep-alives is how the RFC defining them seems
pretty ambivalent on their use. Support is optional, delivery is not
guaranteed (ACK segments with no data aren't reliably transmitted), and
implementations may vary.

See: <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1122#page-101>

At the end of the day they're a fine freebie for protocols like SSH to use
(although they're spoofable...), but we wanted finer-grained control in order
to optimize resource usage on the device, our servers, and the pipes between.

I'd love to hear about others' experiences with TCP keep-alives though.

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pxlpshr
Urban Airship is a great product, we use it and it really reduces a lot of
headaches. There's really no reason to try and lay all the pipe yourself,
particularly if you're just getting started. And furthermore, Urban Airship
picks up where Apple leaves off with a lot of nice features you'll find you
need later.

Their team is also super friendly and responsive. We've sent multiple support
emails with answers coming within hours.

~~~
mtrichardson
Thanks! That means a lot to us :D

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waratuman
I don't fully understand Urban Airship. I find it really easy to do push
notifications, especially for the iPhone. Why would I use this?

~~~
mtrichardson
We've been doing this for over a year. We're extremely familiar with all of
the quirks of the process around push notifications and, during that time,
have listened to what our customers are asking for. We've implemented most of
these features and are in the process of implementing more. Using Urban
Airship, you get things like autobadge (increment/decrement), quiet time (no
alerts in the middle of the night for customers who don't want them), a super
easy broadcast feature, arbitrary grouping by tags, scheduled notifications,
the ability to hook up an RSS feed to automatically push notifications, and a
web UI to send notifications... features like that, in addition to that, we
have great support, so if something isn't work right you have a team you can
go to get help.

A lot of our customers don't even have any server at all, they just use us.

On top of all that, we also have a great in-app purchase solution and rich
messaging through AirMail.

It goes a lot beyond just a simple API to send push notifications. :)

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gaius
OK this is not an actual urban airship - just another website. Disappointing.

~~~
schmichael
I think I can speak for everyone at Urban Airship when I say we're all a bit
disappointed we don't have an actual airship.

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risotto
Solid! I use Prowl on the iPhone for push stuff. I get around paying for SMS
with Google Voice and Prowl.

Will definitely check Urban Airship out.

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gigafemtonano
The TC article doesn't mention the In-App Purchase features you offer. It
sounds like you offer free-for-the-user updates to applications as well as
providing infrastructure for traditional in-app purchases managed through
Apple's billing. I'm curious about how you bill for these features if you
don't mind taking a moment to explain.

~~~
mtrichardson
Sure thing.

For in-app content delivered through our infrastructure, whether it's free or
paid through Apple's in-app purchase, we charge $0.05/download.

An API call is made to our system when a person wants to download content. If
it's a paid item, a receipt is included in that call and we then validate the
receipt with Apple. After that, the application can download the content.

