Push Notification & Store Kit – An Interview With Urban Airship
By 
Mobile Orchard Beginning iPhone Programming Workshop. Bay Area, July 30-31. $999 early bird registration. Save $200 with “mo” discount code.
iPhone 3.0 has arrived, and with it push notification and in-app purchase.
In this interview, Scott Kveton, Michael Richardson and Steven Osborn of Urban Airship talk about the ins and outs of these new capabilities, the challenges of maintaining server infrastructure as an iPhone developer, and their services that seek to alleviate those pain points.
You can listen using the Flash player below, download the MP3, or subscribe to the iPhone Developer Podcast using the instructions at the bottom of this post.
For easy scanning of the interview, here is what was covered and when:
- 1:30 – Urban Airship offering
- 2:30 – Push notification overview
- 3:30 – Urban Airship handling push notification for Tap-Tap revenge
- 4:00 – Implementing push notification without a service like Urban Airship
- 4:30 – Send JSON messages, persistent connection, device tokens/feedback service for unsubscribe
- 5:00 – What’s missing in the sample implementation in Apple’s forums that demonstrate push notification in a dozen lines of code?
- 5:45 – Feeback service for managing “inactive” devices
- 7:15 – Persistent connections
- 8:30 – Implementing push via Urban Airship
- 12:00 – Building a relationship with Apple
- 13:00 – In app purchase
- 13:30 – Connecting receipt info to a content download after in-app purchase
- 14:00 – 3-10% of users use the app over the long term; the in-app purchase creates an additional revenue stream from those folks
- 15:00 – Pricing model
- 17:00 – A free option?
- 18:30 – Options for in app purchase: embedded content/features, downloadable content/feature
- 19:30 – Advantages/disadvantages of embedding the content in the app
- 21:30 – Purchase request programming model
- 25:45 – Consumable and non-consumable items
- 27:00 – Apple review process for in-app purchases
Keep up to date with our iPhone developers’ podcast
Subscribe to our iPhone Development Podcast in one of two great ways:
- Use the podcast’s feed with the feed app of your choice: https://podcast.mobileorchard.com/feed/podcast/
- Subscribe using iTunes by clicking here.
We hope you enjoy the podcast, and if you have any suggestions of who we should interview (or want to be interviewed yourself), use our Contact page or leave a comment against this post. Thanks for listening!
About Our Theme Music
Like the riff that opens the show? Buy the full song on iTunes.
Still not clear on whether what they are providing. For example I want to send a notification out daily with specific content for n number of users, how do I activate this and get their servers to send out the push notifications?
Michael: your iPhone application would register through either your existing services or directly to our API the device token for each user. When you want to send a push notification to a user you would reference this device token along with the message you want to send along doing an HTTP POST to our API. You can also alias a device in our system so that its easier to reference through our API. Hope this helps.
Thanks Scott. That explains it for me. Appreciated.
regards, Michael.
Hi , i am developing a brazilian Holidays APP for iphone witch uses an APNS , my question is How can i integrate my own data base with your server ?
How I get all tokens from who had installed my APP even APPLE says I can’t store those because I have the feedback service ?; I need to integrate “token DATABASE with feedback service”?
regards Gabriel.