Layer Brings A Scalable Communications Platform To Any Mobile Or Web App (opens in new tab)

Some existing platforms included Scringo, Lobi SDK, QuickBlox. None seemed polished or customisable enough for my purposes. See more here: http://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-existing-APIs-for-impleme...

I ended up using an open-source iOS chat UI control (https://github.com/jessesquires/MessagesTableViewController) and Firebase (here is a sample project of a real-time iOS chat app: https://github.com/firebase/firechat-ios). It was incredibly easy to setup a real-time chat app and provides me with full UI customisation and a flexible and scalable data backend.

Send and receive code:

    // Setup.
    self.firebase = [[Firebase alloc] initWithUrl:kFirechatNS];

    // Listen for messages (real-time).
    [self.firebase observeEventType:FEventTypeChildAdded withBlock:^(FDataSnapshot *snapshot) {
        // Add the chat message to the array.
        [self.chat addObject:snapshot.value];
        // Reload the table view so the new message will show up.
        [self.tableView reloadData];
    }];

    // Send message.
    [[self.firebase childByAutoId] setValue:@{@"name" : self.name, @"text": aTextField.text}];

If Layer was around when I was looking I would have tried it out, however I am happy with Firebase as my backend now. The API looks insanely easy to use though.

Media sharing features would be difficult to implement using what I described above so Layer would be advantageous here.

Great branding.

Also Layer, please make your iOS framework available on CocoaPods.

I'm curious, what's open about it?

Internet was built to be the standard of communication and I feel Layer takes that spirit a level higher to application infrastructure.

I wasn't able to figure out if there is a strong security play, especially in the current zeitgeist. They touched on doctor nurse communication so perhaps security is an adoption.

How does Layer compare to, say, e-mail on the one hand, and Diaspora on the other?

Edit: 15 comments besides mine, and 15 employees listed on the site. /conspiracy