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Comment by valachio | Hacker News Reader

This is a biased article. I would not let another company handle authentication or notifications for my apps. Payments, yes.

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Sure, it is obviously biased – I started Courier because I think developers shouldn't be building their notifications infra themselves.

Why would you offload payments instead of e.g. connecting directly to payment gateways yourself, but wouldn't do the same for auth & notifications?

Payment has lots of legal pitfalls if done wrong not to mention the financial damage.

FWIW given GDPR, CCPA, et al so do auth & communication. I'd honestly have a big problem with our team wanting to store passwords ourselves...

You don't store passwords. And regarding GDPR, I have problems giving sensible data to third parties. Another point of failure and no control for me what happens to the data.

Both auth and notifications get extraordinary complex at even minimal scale. Obviously each business needs to decide which areas make sense to invest from tech perspective but LinkedIn and AirBnB each spend around $20m/year just on their notification systems.

https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/airbnbs-promotions-and...

https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2018/03/air-traffic-co...

> notifications for my apps

What kind of notifications are we talking about where you can get away with self-hosting? AFAIK, Push Notifications on smartphones have to go through Google and Apple's servers. Maybe if you're doing email notifications?

I think there are a lot of 3rd party wrapper around Google & Apples Push APIs, which are not really needed. You can send Push Notification yourself just fine.

For email though, not sure, that's a completely different topic. It comes with many headaches, using a service like SendGrid or Mailchimp seems like a good idea, and if you really want to roll our own mail servers down the line you can still do that.

I'm no mobile developer, so I don't really know what I'm talking about. Please enlighten me if you can. Doesn't push notifications on iOS require using Apple Push Notification service? That was my last impression I got when I talked with someone about it.

Yes, you send a request to Apple's APIs and they will deliver a push notification. It's very simple really. Now there are a lot of wrappers around that (like courier.com) and instead of using Apple's API you know use the wrappers API. That also often requires some kind of 3rd party SDK to be integrated in your app.

These services are supposed to make things easier and have additional features like SMS notifications and so on, but, well not sure, never really used them myself.

Right, that was my initial point. You can't self-host notifications as they always go through either Apples or Androids servers, with neither company provide a way to self host that part.

What are good wrappers (not services!!!) for the apple and Google (and browser) notification APIs that handle the entire process? I only used Firebase for this purpose as when I started to look for self hosted solutions, they were all scattered libs with 'only 20000 easy steps to set up notifications for x!'. Maybe this has changed and I missed it: I would like to move away from Firebase.

For email we run bsd (not that that matters, it is just a factoid) servers, correctly configured which seem to work well (mail does not get to spam unless it is).

It's kind of funny that you'd allow someone else to manage money, but you wouldn't let someone else manage something that has the potential to cost you an equal or greater amount of money in GDPR violation fees and lawsuits.

Exactly!

How does using an external service for auth shield you from having to be responsible with your users‘ data?

GDPR compliance is not something you can just buy.

I think this was in reference to someone managing compliance of your notifications.

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