9 Million Reasons
Apparently it's been a good year for Sony: their Xperia line of Android phones has certainly been a contributing factor to a 39-million-Euro profit-before-taxes for 2010. As part of their recently-released 2010 financial report, they prominently announce the sale of over nine million Xperia devices last year. Thus far, not a single one of those 9 million phones (rooted-and-rom'd devices excepted, of course) runs any version of Android newer than 2.1. And if you read my previous post, you know what that means: no C2DM push notifications.
Those Xperia devices represent 9 million reasons for developers to carefully consider how they implement push in their applications. That isn't to say "use Deacon, we're better!" (because admittedly, by several metrics, we're not!) but rather to suggest that a silver-bullet strategy for push notifications leaves a huge potential market unserved. While certain apps could provide "push-disabled" versions for pre-2.2 devices, developers then risk offering disparate user experiences that result in polarized opinions of their product. Rather than falling back to polling or disabling push altogether, if a developer plans to maintain a source tree for pre-2.2 devices anyway, why not use Deacon as a fall-back push provider? Given that the same application server that feeds Google's C2DM backend could be easily adapted to act as a Meteor event controller in the case that a client connects from a pre-2.2 handset.
[Xperia image: Wikimedia Commons / Espen Irwing Swang]
