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Comment by SimonDawlat | Hacker News Reader

Hello HN. Founder here. Happy to answer any questions.

In a nutshell: I was inspired to build this service after the AppGratis/Apple disagreement back in 2013 where most of the controversy revolved around our supposed "abuse of push notifications" (Guideline 5.6, in Apple's book).

What happened next made me realize how important notifications were going to be: it's the next interface for users, while developers rely on them entirely for growth and engagement. But until today there was no analytics service dedicated to this new medium, which is what we're trying to build with Batch Insights.

Hope you'll like it.

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> made me realize how important notifications were going to be: it's the next interface for users

Hi Simon. Why do you think that pn will be so important? I have Cyanogenmod without google apps, and I don't miss pn one bit. I understand that I am not the typical user, but what do you see in pn that I don't?

First off, for studying apps behaviors over the past months we've observed some pretty interesting content strategies: marketers and content producers are hard at work on making notifications are more polished experience. Then, platforms are pushing notifications forward, they know it creates addictions for both developers and users so they're likely to invest more there in the future. It's becoming the interface for users. For developers, it's growth + engagement. Eventually, notifications formats themselves are evolving: richer, with images, with more characters, with more elaborate call to actions, etc. I'll think we'll see some interesting innovations in this space in the next 18/24 months.

I'm still totally with you on Cyanogenmod with no pn. As someone wrote earlier today on the Internet: 'I miss the good old days of being AFK'.

How is push notification different from an SMS or a call?

I don't have all of them on vibration, they don't all have the same importance to me but mostly it's just another way of communication. When I receive an email, I wan't to know it, when someone contact me on Skype or Facebook, I wan't to know it too.

If I don't wan't to be disturb, I just press volume down and the vibration is off.

How do you deal with apps that have in-app preferences to toggle certain notifications on/off? Or is this just for notifications that are enabled by default?

I think I'm missing something. Does Urban Airship not provide an analytics service to their customers about the effectiveness of their push campaigns?

Urban Airship provides a suite of reports to reveal the effectiveness of each of your messages. UA also offers custom events for ROI analysis as well as A/B testing.

I'm sure they do – what we're trying to do is have a more holistic approach by looking at all apps!

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