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)
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?
Anyway good luck with pushover :)
Also, please allow a way to delete notifications in the app. I guarantee you that will be one of the most requested features :)
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.
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.
(I was cofounder of Notifo)
My startup uses Boxcar for deploy notifications, new paying customers, etc.
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!
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.
