By Brent Hieggelke • February 13th, 2012 • Posted in Best Practices, Company, Customers, Developer, Events, Industry
The crew is on the ready, the flight plan is set and the blueprint for a SXSW experience you won’t soon forget is coming to life. Over the next month you’ll be able to follow along in our journey as we bring Urban Airship’s Mobile Roundtable to the streets of Austin for SXSW; it’s beginning to take shape.
Last week you learned that we really are planning a mobile, mobile leadership event. With round-trips jumping off from The Screen Porch at W Austin, and a secret, ultra-cool way station, a few of you will have the opportunity to mix and mingle in small group discussions led by mobile, marketing and developer luminaries.
People like Andrew Mager, Chief Listening Officer at Spotify, and Chris Messina, Developer Advocate at Google, will spark a wide variety of discussions, from how mobile is changing content, marketing and consumer behavior, to how industries can adapt to seize new opportunities.
Head on over to our event site and submit your email address to get updates on how you may be able to hitch a ride with us in Austin.
By Sasha Mace • February 8th, 2012 • Posted in Company, Customers, Developer, Industry, Product
Steve Jobs once said that “you can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”
Now of course, being almost three years old, we’re not starting from scratch and with more than 12 billion push notifications sent it’s clear that app developers and mobile marketers want what we’ve got. But the journey is just beginning.
Rather than ask you what you want today, we want to understand you. Your objectives, your challenges, your world, a day in your life. By doing so, we can more closely align our product roadmap to offer solutions for your tomorrow.
If you can find 10-15 minutes to take our personae survey, we’ll give you the shirt off our back…actually, we’ll give you a fresh, clean, never-worn one.
By Mike Herrick • February 3rd, 2012 • Posted in Best Practices, Company, Developer, Industry, Operations
This is the first in a series of posts that explores some of the things we’re doing behind the scenes in Urban Airship Engineering. Over the next few months, members of the engineering team will offer insight into how we operate, lessons we’ve learned, open source projects we have created and some of the challenges we face serving hundreds of millions of instances of apps connecting to our services every day.
Culturally and from a process standpoint, Urban Airship Engineering is focused on learning and adapting through continuous improvement. We wish we were smart enough to have invented these techniques, but luckily we didn’t have to. The way we conduct product development day to day is an adaptation of ideas in various books including the Poppendieck’s books on Lean Software and David Anderson’s Kanban.
“Value Stream” is a term that originated with Lean Manufacturing meaning to analyze and design the flow of materials and information required to bring a product or service to a consumer. The whole idea is to drive out waste, deliver fast, build quality in, and engage all of the people involved in the value stream so that great products emerge. Urban Airship has had a lot of success with Kanban and Kaizen. Don’t let those words scare you off if you don’t speak Japanese, they just mean “billboard” and “change for the better,” respectively. This post explores our high-level history in applying these concepts and how we’ve begun to scale our process across our SF and PDX offices as necessitated by bringing Urban Airship and SimpleGeo together as one company last October.
Model What’s Happening Now and Let Improvement Emerge
We started with Kanban and Kaizen when I joined Urban Airship in October 2010. The engineering team at the time was following an adaptation of Agile/Scrum and while it was producing results, it wasn’t working as well as we wanted it to in serving all the needs of a venture-backed startup. We adapted our operating model to a starter version of what is described in Anderson’s Kanban book. A great thing about Kanban is starting is easy; you just model the value stream as it is and define work-item types that are meaningful to the team (e.g., Bug Pack, Minimum Marketable Feature, Business Enablement, Refactoring/Technical Debt). Each work-item that is in process, planned, or recently completed gets hung up on a physical board with lanes that indicate the current value stream.
- Airshippers discussing the original set of work-items and where they fit in the value stream in October 2010
- The original wee Kanban board at Urban Airship’s previous office above PIE
Every morning we have a Product Development Boardwalk. This is a standup style meeting where we walk through every work-item on the board in no longer than 15 minutes. We rotate the facilitator of this meeting every day to keep it fresh and make sure that everyone knows the process well enough that they can lead the team through it. This establishes shared context for everyone on what is happening in the value stream. It’s amazing what smart people can achieve together when they have the same context! Physical Kanban boards are still unrivaled for enabling this.
We tweaked our value stream a bit here and there as we learned from successes and failures. We introduced new work-item types, changed WIP limits, added exit criteria, added lanes, split lanes etc. We broke out a separate board right next to Product Development for Customer Development & GTM (Go-to-Market). We made these changes based on insights from our monthly Operational Review & Retrospective and from 5 Whys from production incidents and other defects.
A Year Later: SimpleGeo Acquisition, Investment and Development Partners
In October of 2011, Urban Airship acquired San Francisco-based SimpleGeo, took on a new round of financing and executed some major business agreements that would cause the company to grow even more quickly than it was already. In order to keep work-items flowing, it was time to begin to scale our value stream.
Urban Airship is a very in-person company. In order to make our value stream work across offices, we decided to replicate it in both locations. To achieve the same feel we had when it was just PDX, we now alternate facilitating offices every week. Individuals in the facilitating office also rotate every day. We’re still working out the kinks to be sure, but it’s working and is a lot of fun.
Our Kanban board was showing it’s age even before these events occurred. We had grown engineering four-fold and with that it was getting harder to see everything and achieve shared context. In order to address this and begin to scale into small sets of focused teams, we introduced horizontal lanes for each major part of our product line. We have kept the meeting wide open to anyone who wants to participate or observe, but now just the engineering leadership team (leaders of functional areas, program managers, product managers, tech leads, team leads, etc.) attends the Product Development Boardwalk every morning. Many of these leaders maintain what we refer to as a “Zoom In” Kanban board, which is focused on a specific functional area or work-item that rolls up to the main Product Development board.
The Product Development Kanban board in PDX (left wall) and Polycom unit with the replica board in SF
The SF Polycom unit displaying the PDX Kanban board
A real live Product Development Boardwalk meeting with Wade Simmons from SF facilitating via Polycom
The SF Product Development board (notice the glare from the warm California sun)
An example “Zoom In” Kanban board (far wall) in our Messaging Feature Room in PDX
Looking Forward
Change is constant at Urban Airship. As we continue to grow our team, scale to a billion devices using our services and build new features and products, we’ll keep making adaptions to how we operate in Urban Airship Engineering.
Tools / Technology
We use the following tools and technology to power our Kanban:
- The biggest baddest magnetic white boards we can find
- The most powerful magnets we can find
- Magnet pictures of our people
- White board markers
- Colored note cards (indicate different classes of service)
- Colored markers (to indicate different work-item types (e.g., Minimum Marketable Feature, Bug Pack)
- Polycom to power the video conferencing between offices
- Google Hangouts and Skype for Zoom In video conferencing
- LeanKitKanban – web-based Kanban board we use to help sync the SF and PDX boards. It also produces some great metrics and graphs that we use to understand what is happening across product development (e.g., Continuous Flow Diagram, Cycle Time per lane, per work-item type, etc., Card Distribution Diagrams, Efficiency Diagrams, and even a Process Control Diagram)
- JIRA – we use it to track details of work-items and as the electronic record we reference in source control, etc.
Sound like a value stream you’d thrive in? We’re hiring in SF and PDX!
Urban Airship Engineering hires people with opinions who care deeply about their work, technology, the products they build and making a huge impact on the market. Every person on our team is asked to be part of the solution and to contribute a ton.
Come join us: http://urbanairship.com/company/jobs
By Scott Townsend • January 5th, 2012 • Posted in Best Practices, Company, Developer, Industry, News
Today App Design Vault chose Urban Airship as the #1 tool on their 32 Top Resources Mobile App Developers Should Know About list. We are thrilled that the folks at App Design Vault feel so strongly about the services we provide. We love our customers and hope that they find value in this list.
[Source: iPhone App Design]
By Elizabeth Robillard • January 4th, 2012 • Posted in Developer, Industry, News
All industries across the globe are talking about mobile apps, their impact in 2011 and what opportunity they hold for 2012. Today we saw two interesting moves that prove out what everyone is talking about. Two great app development shops, Ubermind and Small Society, were acquired by enterprise organizations who are investing to make mobile apps play a bigger part in their business.
Ubermind was acquired by Deloitte. An interesting move by Deloitte and a sign that they are making bets in Mobile to broaden their offering significantly. Read what Ubermind and Deloitte had to say about the acquisition.
Small Society, was acquired by Walmart Labs. Small Society will now be working solely for Walmart brands and we are sure they will be delighting consumers with their mobile innovations. Read what Raven and James from Small Society are saying about joining Walmart.
News around consolidation in our industry is nothing new or surprising. Mobile apps are a booming category with many players and we have seen plenty of consolidation amongst the playing field. What we find interesting about this news is that two great app development shops were picked up by big enterprise players. This adds real merit to all of the talk around the growing need to invest in mobile apps. Congratulations to these two talented agencies and to the companies who invested in a better mobile future – We look forward to seeing your continued innovations.
By Dylan Boyd • December 8th, 2011 • Posted in Company, Developer, Industry, News, Partnerships, Product • 1 Comment
At Urban Airship we are committed to making it easy for app developers to create engaging mobile experiences and we are always on the lookout for companies that share our vision. We are excited to announce that Cabana and Kinvey have joined Appcelerater, PhoneGap and ShoutEm as Urban Airship strategic platform partners. As strategic platform partners they offer Urban Airship products to the apps developed on their platforms. Through these partnerships we will can offer developers our powerful engagement and monetization products through these app development platforms, working together to build a more successful mobile future.
Appcelerator is a mobile development platform for javascript developers. Appcelerator Titanium lets you build native mobile, tablet and desktop application experiences using existing web skills like Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby, and PHP. Check out their video to learn more.
Cabana is a browser based mobile app development platform that changes the way apps are made. They achieve this through the combination of a highly visual drag and drop development environment, an innovative graph based visual programming system, and the Cabana Exchange, a component marketplace that contains functionality from some of the top mobile app service providers. Check out their video to watch it in action.
Kinvey is the first Backend as a Service that makes it ridiculously easy for developers to setup, use and maintain a cloud backend for their mobile apps. Check out their video to learn more. Kinvey will make it easy for you model your data, drop in libraries, API’s and add your own code, and synch your data on an ongoing basis.
PhoneGap is an HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and app stores. PhoneGap leverages web technologies developers already know best including HTML and JavaScript, allowing you to build your app using web standards but still deploy it out across multiple mobile platforms. Check out their video to learn more.
ShoutEm native mobile app maker. Their platform allows you to build slick native apps for iPhone, Android and iPad. ShoutEm integrates with your website, your YouTube and Flickr channels and take all that content across mobile platforms. Check out their website and learn more how easy and simple it is to build the app these days.
We are excited to partner with these powerful app development platforms and will keep working hard to create more opportunities to make it easy for developers to use Urban Airship’s app engagement, monetization and reporting platform. If you don’t already have an app, check out these platforms to see if any is right for you. If you already have an app and want to see your app audience more engaged with it, see how Urban Airship can help.
By Scott Kveton • December 6th, 2011 • Posted in Android, Customers, Developer, Helium, Push
Amazon shipped their first Kindle Fires eight weeks ago and since then we’ve seen a lot of interest in the platform from our customers. Consumers are jumping in too, making the Kindle Fire the best-selling product across all of Amazon.com since it became available. We’re also excited about the Kindle Fire, and even more excited to let you know that Urban Airship’s Helium push notifications for Android are already deployed on tens of thousands of devices: it just works.
Over the weekend we had several customers go live on the Fire using our Helium push notifications. Glu Mobile is just one of our customers who are using our push notifications for Android in all of their games for the Fire. When we asked Glu if they did anything special to activate push in their games for the Kindle Fire, Mike DeLaet, VP of Sales & Marketing said, “We just integrated the Urban Airship SDK into these titles like we do for all of our titles, which allows us to utilize push notifications on the Kindle Fire.” Our customers depend on Push to drive engagement and provide the best user experience possible for their applications. With Helium they can do that for the Kindle Fire today.
A little background: the Fire is an Android device with a few key differences. It is missing Google’s Mobile Services (Android Market, C2DM, Google IAP, etc). Additionally, your app cannot require a gyroscope, camera, WAN module, Bluetooth, microphone, GPS, or micro-SD to function. Beyond that, it’s Android 2.3.4 with a new screen size and functions just like any WiFi-connected Android device.
We know that in the world of mobile phones, tablets, PC’s, and other IP connected devices, powerful engagement tools are a requirement for success. We’re continually working to extend our services to any device and as many platforms as possible. But device and platform support only gets you so far–and that’s where our tools come into play. Urban Airship enables you to effectively address and engage with your application audience. With our recent acquisition of SimpleGeo, the future holds many exciting additions to our products, like enabling audience segmentation on a local level for the Kindle Fire and beyond. These are exciting times and we’re just scratching the surface on what we can do.
For more details on setting up an app for the Kindle Fire and selling it in the Amazon App Store, see their Developer FAQ. If you are interested in using Helium to power push on a Kindle Fire or any other Android device, check out our Pro Plans. And finally, if you want to make addressing your Kindle Fire audience easier, take a look at our FAQ on setting tags for your Kindle Fire app installations.
By Sasha Mace • November 8th, 2011 • Posted in Developer, iOS 5, Product, Push Composer, Rich Push
Today we’re adding Rich Push™ Composer to all existing Pro and Premium accounts, as well as anyone who has signed up for our 45 day trial. Much like Push Composer, this new wizard allows you to build and preview Rich Push™ messages for your audience. Rich Push™ is a product that we’ve had available for quite some time via our API, but it’s always been missing a certain something on the front-end. That certain something was a user-friendly interface, which we proudly bring you today with this launch. We think you’ll agree.
The power of Rich Push™ is in its ability to bring the mobile web to your audience messaging, inside your app. Every Rich Push™ is a WebKit view, and carries with it all the flexibility of HTML5, CSS3, WebKit, forms, and myriad additional technologies. This power is now in your hands with the new composer. We’ve added a number of default styles to get you started, and threw in a few examples to spark your imagination. You can build and send coupons, create a form for voting, prompt for account signups, or any number of workflows – the sky is the limit. Much like an email marketing tool, you host all of your media assets like images and video, and we deliver the markup to your users with all the power of Urban Airship tags, aliases, and Push Notifications. See past messages sent, pickup where you left off with drafts, and duplicate a successful message for re-use, all in one easy to use wizard. Check out
the video to see it in action.
Rich Push™ Composer is just the beginning of the interaction. After adding our Rich Push™ Inbox to your app with our embedded iOS library these messages will live on for each of your app’s audience members. The Inbox has full management control for your users, with read/un-read marks, and the ability to delete messages. Indeed if you use our Rich Push™ API, you can also manage their Inbox for them remotely. If you want to remove a time-sensitive message from their list, that capability is in your hands. App users will see beautiful rich HTML messages that overlay your app cleanly, and a familiar Inbox format. Customize the default look and feel to fit your app, or use our sample off the shelf. If your app demands a truly compelling user experience we’ve also built in a Javascript to Objective-C bridge into the iOS library. You can have dynamic Rich Push™ messages which take an action directly in your app, like taking your user directly to a In-app Purchase view.
We’re only scratching the surface of Rich Push™, and now with a full Composer you can see its power immediately. Sign up for a free trial today to get access to Rich Push™ Composer and let us know what you think!
By Sasha Mace • August 25th, 2011 • Posted in Developer, In-App Purchase, Product, Subscriptions
Version 1.0.6 of our iOS client library is now available.
This includes our first round of iOS5 support; like everyone else, we’ve been testing the iOS 5 betas and have found a few things that need fixing along the way. We will release another library update with additional features and fixes once iOS 5 is released.
The release out today contains full support for Newsstand and Auto-Renewables. Check out the new library now.
Newsstand
Newsstand applications are new to iOS 5. They are normal apps that live inside the Newsstand folder and have a dedicated iTunes Store. Additionally, Newsstand apps can download new content in the background even when the app is not running. This ensures that users have their latest news and periodicals waiting for them each morning in an easy-to-find location – the Newsstand!
Urban Airship has support for Newsstand built directly into our Subscriptions product. When you create new content, you can choose to send a Newsstand Push Notification that corresponds with the content’s publish date. This special Push Notification will trigger the background download of that content within your app. All you need to do is follow Apple’s instructions for turning your app into a Newsstand app, and integrate our library with Subscriptions. Then the next time you publish content, check the Newsstand box and it will be waiting for your users when they wake up.
FAQ:
Q: How can I get access to Newsstand?
A: You need a Premium account.
Q: Do I have to use Subscriptions in order to use this feature?
A: Yes, if you want our system to send the once-a-day Newsstand Push automatically with your content. You can generate this Newsstand push yourself using our regular Push API as well.
Q: When will this be available?
A: It is available today, however it only works in the Apple Sandbox currently, until iOS 5′s official release. It requires a premium account to access.
Q: Do I need to upgrade the Urban Airship Library to use this feature?
A: Yes, you will need to upgrade to 1.0.6 in order to take full advantage of this feature with Subscriptions
Q: What exactly does the new library provide?
A: We give you helper classes and example code for receiving the Newsstand Push Notification and processing the content_id contained with it into a background download. You still have to implement all the library, issue, and bundle specific changes as well as delegate callbacks that are required by the NewsstandKit Framework.
For further information please reference Apple’s developer documentation on NewsstandKit and what’s new in iOS 5.
Auto-Renewables
Our Subscriptions product now has full support for iOS Auto-Renewables. This includes every standard period and feature from the iTunes Setup for Auto-Renewables, as well as continued support for non-renewing subscriptions. Auto-Renewables gives your users the power of seamless iTunes Account support for subscriptions, including restore and account management through standard iOS integrations. You will no longer need an email based restore workflow (but it’s still there if you do).
If your app is currently using non-renewing subscriptions you can use our latest iOS library to transition to Auto-Renewables – we support both systems in use at the same time. All you need to do is add your iTunes Shared Secret to the Urban Airship setup for Subscriptions, and then create the Auto-Renewable products in iTunes and your Urban Airship app setup. Content publishing works just as it did before. Auto-Renewables is available today to all current and future Subscription users!
Frequently Asked Questions:
Q: Does Auto-Renewables require a library update?
A: Yes. You will need to upgrade your application to our 1.0.6 iOS library.
Q: Is Auto-Renewables tied to iOS5?
A: No. Auto-Renewables is available now and does not require iOS5 to function.
Q: How does Apple’s “opt-in marketing incentive” work with your solution?
A: If you configure an opt-in incentive amount of subscription time for users who volunteer their address info, that time will automatically be added to the subscription they purchase. You don’t need to setup anything on Urban Airship’s side for this to work. Simply configure it in iTunes Connect and the opt-in information will appear in the iTunes Sales reports over time.
Q: Can I use both non-renewing subscriptions and auto-renewable subscriptions at the same time?
A: Yes, but we recommend you use one or the other. Apple is moving towards auto-renewables over the long term. Additionally if you offer both, you will need to support both the email restore feature, as well as the regular In-App Purchase restore process that works for Auto-Renewables.
Details on this release
This release has been tested with Xcode 4.1 and 4.2, though it is easiest to pair 4.0.2/4.1 with iOS 4 and earlier releases, and keep iOS 5 betas separate for now. There are a few key changes to be aware of if you’re using our default user interfaces for StoreFront, Subscription, or Rich Push inbox.
- StoreFront, Subscriptions and Inbox affected by changes to the modal display API.
- Rich Push inbox UI is affected by changes to the Tab Bar Item view hierarchy.
In each of the above cases you can upgrade your application to use the UI files in the “Airship/UI/” folder that corresponds to the Urban Airship product you’re using.
iOS 5 Notification Center will work automatically with Urban Airship Push and you don’t need to do anything to take advantage of that new feature. We do recommend upgrading to 1.0.6 in order to be prepared for the next step on iOS. Get it now.
Please send any feedback or bugs to support@urbanairship.com.
By Scott Townsend • August 11th, 2011 • Posted in Developer, Industry • 4 Comments
Our business relies on answering the demands of mobile application developers. We always want to hear from the developer community which is why we partnered up with GetJar to survey a large group of developers about their development plans.
Which mobile messaging channels do you use to communicate with users:
Email was the winner in what developers are using right now, with push notifications in a close second. When we asked what communications channels developers plan to use, however, push tops the list, so we should expect to see push overtaking email as the leading mobile messaging tool going forward. This is maybe the most interesting finding; not that push notifications are more popular on developer roadmaps but that email is going to drop so radically.
User engagement is a perennial hot topic. So how do developers use push notifications to drive engagement (continued and repeated use)? Everyone wants to know which types of apps are having the most success and because success is most accurately measured by engagement, one way to figure this out is to look at which categories of apps are using push notifications and for what reason. It should be no surprise that news alerts and information updates are the most popular use cases. Social and geo updates are at the top of the list too.
If you use push notifications, how are you using them?
* Sample includes 298 developers, polled from across various platforms and roles as part of the quarterly Getjar Appmeter survey (read more about the full results here). Thank you to all of the developers who took the time to participate. We took all of your feedback to heart and will continue to introduce product enhancements and extensions to allow you to continue dazzle your users without worrying about the complexities of message delivery.
