Show HN: Airgram - Send iOS/Android notifications, without building an app

http://www.airgramapp.com

by navneetloiwal • 14 years ago

121 54 14 years ago

Push notifications are a great way to consume time-sensitive information, like price/airfare, sports, stocks, app reviews, etc. Airgram makes it dead-simple to deliver these alerts without having to build your own app, so that you can focus on building interesting services.

Give it a spin! http://www.airgramapp.com

"I think notifications will become the primary way that we consume on the mobile device and may be the reason we move away from downloadable software and back to web based software on our mobile devices." - Fred Wilson (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/mobile-notifications.html)

pxlpshr• 14 years ago

This what Notifo was trying to do but ran into quite a few challenges with adoption. You should talk with them more to see how you differentiate and solve the problem they had...

navneetloiwal6• 14 years ago

Yes, we are already talking to him to learn from his experience

mirsadm• 14 years ago

I'm running it on my Android phone now. It works pretty well. I wish it uses Facebook/Google/etc. for user accounts though. The last thing I want to have to do is have another user/password. Also, what is the difference between this and Notifo (yc2010 I think)?

there• 14 years ago

Congrats on the app, it looks nice.

I launched Pushover (https://pushover.net/) this week, which looks to be pretty much the same exact product as yours: an HTTP API to push messages to an iOS and Android client.

I built it over the past 4 weeks to replace my use of Notifo, which shut down last year. There are a few other apps already available, like Prowl, Boxcar, and NotifyMyAndroid, but none were cross-platform, so I built Pushover.

I am charging for my app as a way to pay for the server costs, as I'm not sure how else these types of apps can make money and stay around. Notifo had a lot of users but their apps were free and I don't know if they even had any paying content providers pushing large amounts of messages. How do you plan to make money with yours?

jwr3• 14 years ago

So did Notifo actually shut down or not? I mean, it still works for me, and the web page is up. I offered many times to pay for the service.

joering23• 14 years ago

there, I like your design better, since I am comparing to Airgram right now: immediately I can see how it looks on the mobile device screen because you provide an image, AND I see the code in different languages, which is easy for my eyes to match to languages I am writing in. So, if I would need this kind of functionality today, I would go with yours.

LokiSnake• 14 years ago

Charging for the app will work for the DIY hacker types, but it'll be hard for other services to convince their users to purchase your app.

navneetloiwal6• 14 years ago

Neat app you have, there. We are not planning to charge for the apps, but keep a look out for premium features on Airgram.

StavrosK• 14 years ago

Huh, very nice. I balked at the non-free app a bit, but hey, if it'll help keep the service alive, I'm all for it. I don't have a pressing need for it currently, but if it gets a bit more mature I will definitely buy the app and use it for the things I use Notifo for now.

huhtenberg4• 14 years ago

Your app icon looks like Pinterest's, but otherwise it looks great, will be trying it out in a jiffy.

ae0000• 14 years ago

I was in the process of building essentially the same app as yours, for the same reasons :) After seeing yours (which I think looks great) I have dropped dev on mine (see: http://redd.it/r47p9) and will probably use your app to hook up some notifications to some other apps of mine.

Anyway good luck with pushover :)

jazzychad3• 14 years ago

Bug report: I created my own service (couldn't update the image because I can't be bothered to resize an image to 84x84 myself, can't you do that?), and subscribed myself to it. I then tested unsubscribing myself from within the app, but now it appears that I cannot re-subscribe myself (even though the API returns 'ok'). It looks like I can't create more than one service, so I've just screwed myself.

Also, please allow a way to delete notifications in the app. I guarantee you that will be one of the most requested features :)

tommytsai19845• 14 years ago

Thanks for all the great feedback. We'll get right on it.

huhtenberg4• 14 years ago

Can you explain how Airgram compares to (now deceased) Notifo?

navneetloiwal6• 14 years ago

We believe that mobile web apps need to become much more powerful than they are today. Developing native apps for various platforms is not easy, and frankly, unnecessary for most services. This is just our first step in bridging the gap between native apps and mobile web apps.

We are looking to provide a suite of services around notifications that not just make it easy to deliver the notifications, but provide better targeting, management and analytics.

nupark23• 14 years ago

> Developing native apps for various platforms is not easy, and frankly, unnecessary for most services [emphasis mine]

I think the fact that you've developed a native app here provides sufficient falsifying evidence for this declaration.

When looking for the optimal (for the user) solution, the decision as between a web site or a native application should be made on the basis of user requirements, and the solutions that best meet those requirements, not based on the technologies that you, personally, are comfortable with.

If you ignore an organization's existing investments in web engineering and web-focused infrastructure, webapps aren't empirically and objectively easier or cheaper. Rather, they're a mechanism by which an organization can leverage money they have already invested in building a web-centric team.

I see this as a temporary state, initially caused by the rapid adoption of the web, and will ultimately disappear as more broad, less web-centric development experience and infrastructure investment becomes the norm.

jjcm• 14 years ago

What happened to Notifo? It's still up as far as I can tell.

PStamatiou• 14 years ago

Read more about it here http://blog.notifo.com/notifo

(I was cofounder of Notifo)

joshu2• 14 years ago

Boxcar?

jdg• 14 years ago

thanks for the mention josh. it's pretty cool that you know we exist.

-jdg

joshu2• 14 years ago

i think i learned about it on HN.

i was using it for home automaton notifications a while back.

iamjoshua• 14 years ago

At SEscout.com we used notifo for user rank change notifications until they announced they would be ending the service. We have been testing boxcar for a future replacement and are pretty happy with it. Feels like a solid product.

mnutt• 14 years ago

Boxcar is great. It was very cool to be able to curl the Boxcar API and have a notification on my phone in a fraction of a second.

My startup uses Boxcar for deploy notifications, new paying customers, etc.

nchuhoai2• 14 years ago

I like the idea of unified notifications, but ultimately you have the chicken-egg problem, and for that you need to find an entry point. I'm working on the same problem and whoever solves it, it will create some great value. Can't wait until notifications get detached from email.

joering23• 14 years ago

excuse me, but what kind of chicken-egg does he have??IF someone needs notification pushed to their phone, they can use his simple web/app. There is no chicken/egg here...

nchuhoai2• 14 years ago

users are not gonna download the app unless many services are using his api, and not many services are gonna use his api unless there is a big user base ... sounds like a prime example of chicken and egg

malvim• 14 years ago

I don't see why you're being downvoted. I failed to see what the chicken/egg problem was as well, it was not obvious to me.

Maybe asking politely for clarification would be better than just denying whatever the parent said, but still...

To the guys who responded to this explaining the problem: Thank you!

esharef• 14 years ago

I like this. I do think my phone is starting to become a bit too noisy though (too many text messages that start being more like email) and I am not sure how to keep it all organized. Perhaps you guys can help.

tommytsai19845• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! We are thinking about various ways to give users a good, easy-to-understand set of controls to manage the noise. Stay tuned.

jwr3• 14 years ago

Ok, so having tried the app — I won't actually use it until there is a "quiet hours" setting. Notifo got that perfectly right: there are certain hours where I do not want to be interrupted by notification sounds from the service (but I might want to keep other sounds on).

navneetloiwal6• 14 years ago

Yes, absolutely. Quiet hours will show up in a day!

rasmusbe• 14 years ago

would be nice if I, as a Service Owner, could see how many subscribers the service has.

navneetloiwal6• 14 years ago

This first version is light on management features for the service owner because we wanted to get it out early to get feedback. What you suggest is absolutely on our list of things to do soon.

haar• 14 years ago

The API page seemed to break on smaller resolution pages (read: thinner).

tommytsai19845• 14 years ago

Tommy here, Airgram co-founder. Thanks for the bug report; we are looking into it. Which browser are you using?

Splines• 14 years ago

Just curious - what's your privacy policy? Are you storing any of the messages that get pushed through this service?

tommytsai19845• 14 years ago

Tommy here, Airgram co-founder. Currently, we are storing these messages, but if our users have some use cases that require messages to not be persisted, we'd be happy to add this feature. Do you have a use case in mind? Would love to hear about it -- e-mail me @ tommy at aircrunch dot com

godfreykfc• 14 years ago

I am really skeptical (though I'd be more than happy to see someone prove me wrong) about these "framework" apps, that doesn't actualy do anything by itself, except to provide an API of some sort for others to take advantage of. They reminds me of those obscure ActiveX plugins (3D model viewers, etc) that sites make you install. I am usually somewhat hesitant about getting them on my computer unless a see great value (eg growl), but I suppose I'll be even less willing to have these on my iPhone, as an app that sits somewhere on my home screen. My users might feel differently about this, but it certainly would be very difficult for me to explain to them what is it that they are installing and the experience could become quite confusing.

Roedou• 14 years ago

I would really like to send mobile push notifications to users of my service. (I send emails and/or SMS right now.)

Developing an iPhone & Android app - even a simple one that simply lets me alert users - is beyond my mobile dev abilities, and (I assume) would cost tens of thousands of dollars for someone to build.

Airgram might be the answer for me to let users get push notifications as an alternate alerting mechanism.

tommytsai19845• 14 years ago

Thanks for considering Airgram! We would love to chat with you to understand how you plan on using us, and what new features you would like to see. Please e-mail me @ tommy at aircrunch dot com if you have some time to chat.

teyc• 14 years ago

Have you figured out how could a website determine if your app is installed? It'd be cute to have a reddit style notification when people reply to your comments in a forum etc.

Show HN: Airgram - Send iOS/Android notifications, without building an app

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