The whole article is about mobile messaging, but SMS isn't involved at all. I understand Airbnb does use SMS, but apparently only for specific use cases.
It's a bid sad, I think, that SMS is being displaced by either in-app messaging services or brand aggregated things like FB messenger. SMS has the advantage that if I don't like my mobile network, I could change providers and not change my address. The whole messaging space is now set to be highly fragmented.
Only if you live somewhere number porting is possible. I live in China, where it is not.
If I switch carriers, I'll have to switch phone numbers, but luckily iMessage, WeChat etc. can be carried to my new phone.
Whereas WeChat, iMessage and others aren't dongled to a phone number.
How do the WhatsApp users change their workplace? Do you use your private phone (BYOD)? Or otherwise you are screwed, right(?), when you switch the workplace, you loose your work cell phone number, and your WhatsApp account. Or is there a way to mitigate this?
I don't use Airbnb as often as I should but I'm wondering do you guys have data on the users who simply use text messaging on the mobile devices (or other instant messengers?).
What led to the decision to spend time optimizing mobile messaging within the Airbnb app than just finding an easier path to connect users through text messaging?
Plus they want to censor and control the conversation; private texting is not happening.
After trying to find a solution earlier this year with my product manager, we decided to just stick to what we had (which was simply manual refresh in the messaging view by the user), due to engineering time/cost.
Since messaging is not a top priority in the app, we agreed to come back to the problem in the future. However, it is absolutely something I would like to solve given the chance. However, at the end of the day, this kind of messaging solution requires the work of backend engineers which will take up development time.
From one of the diagrams it sounds like the API requests a delta update if it receives a push notification, but if the user has disabled push notifications, will the client still know to request an update? Also receiving a notification and then using a new connection to request an update is still slower than something like a web socket/long poll connection where new updates are immediately pushed to clients. Would love to hear how this works.
This seems like an interesting technical problem, but I can't help but feel that there's a significantly easier solution available. As a bonus: other than the fact that you can see messages in the app, I wonder how this is better than simply using SMS or a personalized anonymous email address per host-guest pair.
I've seen variants of this particular problem solved so often I'm surprised there's no open source back-end/platform that solves the back-end piece of this.
disclaimer: I haven't worked with anything on this scale, personally.
We use both products extensively internally; datadog for custom metrics deployed next to features and alerts in code (https://github.com/airbnb/interferon), and New Relic for opinionated application health/performance and client side monitoring.
Two talks we've done about our usage of Datadog and New Relic (respectively):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYmVu_IMC20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd_Kla4f86E
Disclaimer: I'm the presenter in the second talk.
