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Urban Airship Brings Easy Push Notifications To Android

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Re: Urban Airship Brings Easy Push Notifications To Android

#5

Post by guelo »

mtrichardson wrote: post #2

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.

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?

Re: Urban Airship Brings Easy Push Notifications To Android

#6

Post by notnoop »

waratuman wrote: post #4

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?

Pushing iPhone notification requires (somewhat persistent) socket connections. Some environments forbid that, like Google App Engine.

Re: Urban Airship Brings Easy Push Notifications To Android

#8

Post by mtrichardson »

waratuman wrote: post #4

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?

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. :)

Re: Urban Airship Brings Easy Push Notifications To Android

#9

Post by mtrichardson »

guelo wrote: post #5
mtrichardson wrote: post #2

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.

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? * H…

Hi,

Thanks for the questions!

The AirMail Control Panel manages a persistent TCP socket connection to our infrastructure using custom keepalives. Our pings aren't adapted to networks yet, as we just don't have good enough data around that - we've got great monitoring set up around this, so I'm not too concerned about that.

We haven't noticed any drop in battery usage during our (very long) testing phase. That was one of our primary concerns :)

Each instance of the layer of our infrastructure that manages the connections can handle several hundred thousand connections.

You can see the integration story around the push library here: http://urbanairship.com/docs/android_client.html

And the library is up on GitHub: http://github.com/urbanairship/android-push-library

Our app handles notifications by default, but if you don't want it to handle the alerting and want to do it yourself (this was a requirement by some of our larger customers) you can by specifying only an "extra" value. We'll pass that data along and your app can parse it.

And, yes, everything is encrypted.

Thanks for the great questions :D

Re: Urban Airship Brings Easy Push Notifications To Android

#10

Post by bconway »

mtrichardson wrote: post #2

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.

How do you see your business model changing over the next year as Android 2.2 (featuring integrated push notifications, for those who skimmed the article) becomes ubiquitous?
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