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Layer Brings A Scalable Communications Platform To Any Mobile Or Web App

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Re: Layer Brings A Scalable Communications Platform To Any Mobile Or Web App

#12

Post by tomazstolfa »

giosico wrote: post #11

Worried about cost lock in. Can you comment please?

At Layer we will always offer a free tier for low volume products, and only charge once an app gets meaningful traction.

We are here to help apps built on top of Layer win.

Re: Layer Brings A Scalable Communications Platform To Any Mobile Or Web App

#13

Post by giosico »

tomazstolfa wrote: post #12
giosico wrote: post #11

Worried about cost lock in. Can you comment please?

At Layer we will always offer a free tier for low volume products, and only charge once an app gets meaningful traction. We are here to help apps built on top of Layer win.

Thanks for the reply. Good to know.

Re: Layer Brings A Scalable Communications Platform To Any Mobile Or Web App

#16

Post by [deleted] »

rpalmeri wrote: post #10
salimmadjd wrote: post #9

Ron Palmeri has a knack for picking great teams and ideas. The concept of an infrastructure that can later become the standard of communication is great with huge potentials. Internet was built to be the standard of communication and I feel Layer takes that spirit a level higher to application infrastructure. I wasn't able to figure out if there is a strong security play, especially in the current zeitgeist. They tou…

thanks! security and privacy are huge aspects of what Layer is doing. given the team's background we will invest heavily to ensure that the core infrastructure and client side SDK are locked down. my guess is we'll have more people on that aspect alone than most developers can afford to deploy on the full stack.

[deleted]

Re: Layer Brings A Scalable Communications Platform To Any Mobile Or Web App

#19

Post by vaughan »

I was recently working on an iOS app where I needed a 1-to-1 chat feature. I was surprised that there wasn't an established market leader in this space considering how many apps use such a feature. When I saw this post I immediately thought "yep, that is a gap I'd seen in the market".

Some existing platforms included Scringo, Lobi SDK, QuickBlox. None seemed polished or customisable enough for my purposes. See more here: http://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-existing-APIs-for-impleme...

I ended up using an open-source iOS chat UI control (https://github.com/jessesquires/MessagesTableViewController) and Firebase (here is a sample project of a real-time iOS chat app: https://github.com/firebase/firechat-ios). It was incredibly easy to setup a real-time chat app and provides me with full UI customisation and a flexible and scalable data backend.

Send and receive code:

    // Setup.
    self.firebase = [[Firebase alloc] initWithUrl:kFirechatNS];

    // Listen for messages (real-time).
    [self.firebase observeEventType:FEventTypeChildAdded withBlock:^(FDataSnapshot *snapshot) {
        // Add the chat message to the array.
        [self.chat addObject:snapshot.value];
        // Reload the table view so the new message will show up.
        [self.tableView reloadData];
    }];

    // Send message.
    [[self.firebase childByAutoId] setValue:@{@"name" : self.name, @"text": aTextField.text}];
Thoughts on Layer

If Layer was around when I was looking I would have tried it out, however I am happy with Firebase as my backend now. The API looks insanely easy to use though.

Media sharing features would be difficult to implement using what I described above so Layer would be advantageous here.

Great branding.

Also Layer, please make your iOS framework available on CocoaPods.

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