Under the Bridge

You might recall our roundup a while back of middleware push notification services underway or in the works; well, here’s a head to head matchup of the two biggest, iLime and Urban Airship, from a fellow who actually implemented both. And what did he end up with? Why, his own!

… I ended up hijacking the Urban Airship client for my own purposes and modified it to interface with my own home grown implementation. Most of my time was fiddling with the iPhone client app, but once I had things working so that I could run the app and have my server send it notifications. I didn’t feel that the implementation of the server side of sending notifications to APNS was complicated, but I come from a background where I work with this sort of integration quite often. It would likely be pretty daunting to the uninitiated.

And why would one go to that trouble?

I’ve come to realize that the code that does the actual communication of the notifications to the APNS is actually only a relatively small part of what needs to be built. Neither of these services can figure out how often, how much or what you want to notify your users with. Nor can they design your app to consume the notifications in a way that’s uniquely meaningful to your users. From looking at their APIs, they seem to have built some additional functionalities that would be nice (like usage reporting and broadcast notifications) but even those could be built without that much extra effort. I can imagine an app that needs only occasional notifications to be manually sent or, if the developer just didn’t want to have to set up their own server to support push notifications then middleware services such as these have their place. Urban Airship provides a much easier service to use and I give them the thumb’s up. However, there is so much more to integrating push notifications than just the transport of the messages, and I believe it’s worth the effort to not have to a man-in-the-middle between you and your customers (or your revenue stream).

A cogent perspective, yes. However, our standards of “worth the effort” are very very high indeed, so we’re pretty confident that at least for initial implementation soon as we get around to starting that push notification using project we’re supposed to be working on … for a while now, actually … we’re going to go with the middleware people. The best code is code you don’t write, and all that. And apparently we have an informed vote here in favor of Urban Airship!