Urban Airship: On pushing Push Notification and selling In App Purchases
Who helped get Tap Tap Revenge live on launch day?
While us journalists have been getting all excited about the features contained in the 3.0 OS, those poor old developers are having to actually support them. Good thing a bunch of companies are springing up to help out.
One such is very recent start-up Urban Airship, which despite only having been around for a couple of weeks managed to hook up with Tapulous to ensure Tap Tap Revenge 2 was one of the first games on the App Store to support the new world order.
We tracked down its busy and exuberant CEO Scott Kveton to find out about the company's past, present and future... and how free pastries work in terms of viral marketing, of course.
Pocket Gamer: How did Urban Airship come about, and why did you think push notification and micro-transactions would be a good featureset to build your services on?Scott Kveton: Urban Airship was the brainchild of Steven Osborn, our CTO. He had been working on some of this functionality for quite some time and then thought it might make an interesting business.
We quickly formed the rest of the team that included myself and two other developers who we had worked with in the past and Urban Airship was born. The name came from one of our developers, Michael Richardson, and his fascination with airships. (Hint: don't ever call them blimps in front of him).
All of us have a background in building scalable backend web services for developers and we had been thinking about doing something in the mobile space.
We like push notifications and In App purchase as our first products because they are something application developers have been wanting and we believe our solutions decrease their time to market. These are the first of many web services we intend to offer for all of the major platforms.
How quickly did you get something up and running?
Steven had a great codebase that we were able to start from and bringing in the rest of the team helped round that out quickly.
When Apple announced that the iPhone 3.0 release was happening on 17th June we all knew we wanted to be live on that date. We got lucky with some fantastic early customers who were willing to work with on launching on an aggressive timeline.
How did you get the news out to developers and how surprised were to you have Tapulous as your first customer?We went down to WWDC and literally did push notification 1.0: we handed out muffins and danishes to line goers while they waited for the keynote on Monday morning.
The cabbie must have thought we were crazy when we filled up the car to head to Moscone [Moscone Center] with oodles of food for people in line. We just walked the line and handed out flyers and food, telling people about what we were doing.
Tapulous has been a fantastic customer and we knew we were up to the challenge. They came to us because they knew we were ready to ship on the 17th June and they wanted to be the first application live in the App Store with push notifications.
We worked with their amazing engineering team and their director of engineering Jessica even did a post about how well deploying that functionality went for them.
Can you reveal any more developers or games that will be using your technology?
Keep an eye on our blog. Ha. Seriously though, we have some amazing partnerships and customers in the works. I just can't believe how fantastic the iPhone ecosystem is.
What do you think are the main advantages for developers of using an outsourced service such as Urban Airship?
There are several advantages of using services like the ones we provide. Pretty much any iPhone developer could build these services on their own.
However, we believe we help developers focus on their "main thing" - making great applications. We simply help them with services they want/need to make their applications successful.
Time to market is so critical with iPhone applications and our services are priced to not break the bank. We don't ever want a developer so say "Geez, I could do this cheaper myself."
What's the process in terms of integrating your code?For push notifications, your server simply stores the device tokens after the application registers for notifications. Then, when you want to notify that user, make a simple HTTP POST to our server with the message and device token in a simple JSON blob, and you're done. We handle the long lived connections, binary formats, and feedback service.
For In App purchase, you simply bundle up your purchasable content and upload it to our servers. Then you assign the product identifier that corresponds to the item you created in iTunes Connect. Once you've done that your content is ready for download and you just have to add our store front to your application.
To do so you just need to include our static library (or source code if you want to go that route) to your project and insert a line of code into your app where you want the store front to be presented.
Our libraries do the rest. Your user can choose an item for purchase and when they're done we take care of verifying the transaction and delivering the content to your application.
As an added bonus the store front is open source and easily skinnable so it can look and feel just like the rest of your application.
What do you think is the potential in terms of push notification extending the value and fun games with more social features?
We've been astounded at the numbers we've seen with our early customers. People are actually using push and it appears to be driving more usage of their applications.
When people talk about tech right now, you hear a lot about social and mobile. I think putting those two together are where the really interesting things will be happening. Push notification is certainly one of the key building blocks to bringing those two pieces together.
How much further do you think you can extend features such as push notification and micro-transactions?We're already seeing some interesting applications of push notification by developers using our platforms. The badge updates are a big one. On the In App purchase side, we believe there is a lot more to think about than most developers want to have to build themselves...
How do you deal with updates to the content after you have delivered it to the device? How do you re-issue content for a device that was reset? What about being able to use the same content on multiple devices you already own?Each one of these questions raises new issues around providing this service and we think we have a really great product to answer them.
These are just the start, though. We see a whole suite of services that we can offer to developers that help them get to market faster and focus on their core of delivering great applications to iPhone users.
Looking ahead, we also believe that the iPhone is a great leading indicator of things to come for mobile developers on every platform. To that end, we'll be building our services for several platforms like BlackBerry, Pre, Android and Nokia.
What's your business model?Our business model is simple: we charge for the services we provide. Our goal is always to make sure the developers don't say "Geez, I could do this cheaper myself" when they look at our pricing. We strive to be fair and honest and push notifications and In App purchase are just the start.
Our customers are already giving us fantastic ideas for new functionality they would like us to provide. That's when you know you're onto something.
Thanks to Scott for his time.You can check out what's going on with Urban Airship via its website, or buy top notch bacon and bacon-related merchandise from Scott’s side project Bac'n.
