Instacast and Push Notifications

From time to time I get an email with Push Notifications as a feature request or I get a tweet about it. As much as I would like to have push notifications integrated into Instacast myself, it is not that simple.

The Instacast web service has now over 26,000 podcasts listed. In order to make Push Notifications work, the web service would need to observe all podcasts and send out messages to individual users. This is a very hardware and network intensive task. While technically possible, it is simply to expensive at that point. The current income from Instacast app sales does not support these expenses. The only option would be to offer this service as a subscription via in-app purchase, but only if there are enough users to pay for the service maintenance.

Because of that economical problem, I created a little survey on Google Docs. I would be very happy if you could take a minute and fill out the form. It would really help me in my decision making process.

Click here to to the form.

June 28th, 2011 • Permalink