iPhone Push Notification: iLime & Urban Airship Pave the Way With Middleware Offerings

by Bill French on 14/10/09 at 2:00 pm

Bill French is an information architect specializing in Internet applications. He is also the co-founder of MyST Technology Partners and Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.

There are lots of iPhone apps that can improve functionality and engage users by taking advantage of Apple Push Notification Services (APNS). However, it’s a non-trivial development challenge. It requires a web services infrastructure, skills your development team may not possess or resources your company cannot afford. Plus, there’s the time-to-market issue; your competitors are either working on push notifications or they already have it.

Two companies provide fast on-ramps to help you enable enable push notifications in your iPhone app with minimal setup and engineering – iLime and Urban Airship. Rightly so, these firms see push notification requirements and services as part of a specialized communications plumbing.

Focus on Core; Outsource the Rest

iLime and Urban Airship each provide iPhone push notification frameworks that are relatively simple to implement and likely to be cost-effective depending on the number of iPhone app users you have and the velocity of notification-worthy updates. While iLime appears to be the clear winner in terms of price, you must be cautious about forecasting notifications costs because each service provides notifications based on a unique pricing axis. Also note that Airship has provided a note about new fixed price contracts.

iLime’s pricing model is functionally linear through 5 million messages per month; the first 25,000 messages [per month] are free, then it’s 100th ($0.0005) of a nickel up to 50,000 notifications and thereafter, price per message falls while their quantity discount rises. Airship’s pricing model is three-tiered; up to 5,000 messages per month are free; up to 50,000 messages is a flat $29 (or $0.00064 per message for 45,000 messages); over 50,000 messages is $0.001. Overall, it appears iLime is the winner on price and customers will especially like the quantity discount as the volume increases. While high volume use is a nice problem to have, a continually decreasing cost structure is even better.

Setting aside the cost differences, these companies provide essentially comparable services and API’s that are comprehensive and well documented. I found the iLime documentation a little more friendly and approachable for non-techies, but good developers won’t find any trouble working with either product.

While it’s possible to build the services that these companies provide, consider the impact;

You have to build it, test it, debug it, host it
You have to make it hyper-reliable
You have to maintain it (APNS changes are likely)

You must ask yourself – “Does my company want to become experts in notifications plumbing and will this make us more profitable and more competitive?” Make-or-buy decisions should be based on many factors, but a key factor is core versus context.

Push Innovation

At first glance, most of us probably struggle with ideas for using push notifications, so it takes a little creative thought to imagine scenarios where push is a game changer for your business. Meter Maid (with push powered by Airship) is one of those “Why didn’t I think of that?” ideas – it’s ideal for urban dwellers that must manage their parking timers. But most push innovations are in this class of application – simple, elegant, and not-so-obvious until you turn a problem on its head or look at it from a different angle. Buying a push notification service is like buying pancake batter – sure, you can create your own pancake batter but who has time? The more important task is building a complete breakfast and beating your competition.

Engaging Your Audience

Another important reason to implement push notifications has to do with engaging your iPhone app audience. It’s been said that you should never attempt to monetize content; instead, monetize your audience. One way to influence your audience is by helping them compress time or save steps. Push notifications make it possible to avoid launching your app while still being aware of important information.

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Late Breaking News

Urban Airship Priority Push Service

It looks like they’ve added this in response to hyper-push requirements exhibited by their customers. Typically, there is some latency to be expected in all third-party notification services and there’s always ways to reduce latency; more hardware, bigger pipes, faster processors. Airship is inviting certain customers (for more money I assume) to use dedicated services to achieve faster throughput – this is innovative marketing. While most app providers are pretty thrilled and willing to tolerate a significant degree of notification latency, both companies must differentiate their services and I suspect dedicated pipes and hardware is a good start.

Urban Airship Fixed Pricing Option

Depending on your usage and the specific services required, Airship will craft a custom flat rate for your push messaging needs. This will allow you to budget for growth and deal with unexpected bursts.

iLime Service Upgrades

iLime reports that their service has been recently upgraded to support JSON and XML API’s and includes enhanced documentation for ,NET, C# and Java programming interfaces.

iLime’s Enterprise Architect, Chris Grove adds “Our monitoring of the feedback service far different from the way other services do it; iLime actually removes the devices from the notification stream for you whereas other services simply give you an indication they have opted out. This is basically because of a difference in approach; we require all devices to be registered with our service. Since all interactions with iLime devices are through our records, we can update the records based on the feedback service.”

View Comments to “iPhone Push Notification: iLime & Urban Airship Pave the Way With Middleware Offerings”

michaelrichardson

Oct 14th, 2009

Thanks for the great article Bill! Michael from Urban Airship here – I just wanted to clarify a couple of things.

When we announced the priority service we were also able to give a significant price cut to our regular service – with our basic level of service we now give 100,000 free messages per month with a flat rate of $0.001/message after that.

We also don't send along any message to a device token that has been marked as inactive – this has always been the case. We actively monitor and keep up to date the status of device tokens to ensure that your app is always playing by the rules.
Michael Richardson

Oct 14th, 2009

Thanks for the great article Bill! Michael from Urban Airship here – I just wanted to clarify a couple of things.

When we announced the priority service we were also able to give a significant price cut to our regular service – with our basic level of service we now give 100,000 free messages per month with a flat rate of $0.001/message after that.

We also don't send along any message to a device token that has been marked as inactive – this has always been the case. We actively monitor and keep up to date the status of device tokens to ensure that your app is always playing by the rules.
Michael Richardson

Oct 14th, 2009

Thanks for the great article Bill! Michael from Urban Airship here – I just wanted to clarify a couple of things.

When we announced the priority service we were also able to give a significant price cut to our regular service – with our basic level of service we now give 100,000 free messages per month with a flat rate of $0.001/message after that.

We also don't send along any message to a device token that has been marked as inactive – this has always been the case. We actively monitor and keep up to date the status of device tokens to ensure that your app is always playing by the rules.

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