Ask HN: iPhone Push Notifications using Urban Airship?

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!

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.

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.