Portland, Oregon mobile service provider Urban Airship announced today that it now offers push notifications as a service – with a multi-media payload. The white label technology, called AirMail, sends users of iPhone, BlackBerry and soon Android phones a push notification that when clicked launches not just an app, but specific content like images, videos or text inside that app.
Developers who put the AirMail library into their apps will also receive full analytics showing how many recipients opened the messages, how long they spent viewing the content and more. AirMail is available only as a developer preview today but a preview video can be viewed below.
The downside to using services like UrbanAirship is always dependence on 3rd party service providers. This newest feature is probably the startup’s most intimate integration yet from a technology perspective, but development required is non-trivial and the resulting functionality is likely to be a real boon to publishers.
If you’ve got multi-media in an iPhone app, this is a way for it to reach out and grab (with push) your users and keep them engaged.
