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Their team is also super friendly and responsive. We've sent multiple support emails with answers coming within hours.
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?
Right now, it might seem like it's "Oh yay easy push notifications!" but that's not really the main story. The main story is that we're going cross platform with all of our products and we're helping people really take advantage of these great new technologies to help their mobile applications and strategy.
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…
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.
OK this is not an actual urban airship - just another website. Disappointing.
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.
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.
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 wi…