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Comment by nchuhoai | Hacker News Reader

users are not gonna download the app unless many services are using his api, and not many services are gonna use his api unless there is a big user base ... sounds like a prime example of chicken and egg

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The way I see it is that non-mobile application owners can recommend their customers to install this app, rather than create and publish a new one just to listen for notifications.

That's why I don't see the chicken-egg problem.

This is not as easy as it sounds (speaking from experience). The chicken-egg problem is huge in this type of service.

exactly! pretty much everyone in "too expensive/too complicate/we don't want this know" wagon that still want to have some sort of presence on the mobile devices could still have it without any investment other than redirect to his site.

This approach is exactly the opposite of what users want on mobile devices.

And I wouldn't install another app to receive a third-party implementation of push notifications.

If I install any app, I do not expect to have to download dependencies to make it function fully. To that end, this solution is useless.

My outlook is simple: there are native implementations of push notifications on mobile devices. It may cost time and money to set them up, but please spend some time implementing them.

Yup. I wonder if some sort of pledge system would work. Get users add themselves to the "I am interested" list and get publishers commit to integrating with the service once the list hits N users.

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