Push a Bust?

Recently I’ve bought two push notification apps: Boxcar and GPush. I’ve been happy with neither of them.

Boxcar has already been around for a bit and I’ve seen a lot of reviews online that say it “just works”. That’s not my experience. I have enabled push notifications on my phone. I have enabled push notifications in Boxcar, and gave Boxcar my Twitter credentials. So far, it hasn’t been working very well. I got a couple notifications from Boxcar itself (a couple days ago) saying it was having problems with the Twitter API. I received a notification or two from my Twitter account, but since then, nothing.

My experience with GPush has been similar. I have received some notifications, but they were slow in coming, and I haven’t received notifications for every email I get. Which is quite annoying.

What’s the use in buying these apps if they don’t work?

2 Comments

  1. Hi Henning,

    Thanks for trying out and buying Boxcar. I’d love to help you figure out the problem, feel free to send me an email at support@boxcar.io.

    As you note above, we have many, many satisfied customers. The last few days have been far from optimal, but unfortunately it’s been out of our hands. Twitter is still under an ungoing Denial of Service attack, and our uptime is only as good as theirs. :)

    As a result we’ve had to throttle back our polling. As soon as Twitter gives us the all clear, we’ll turn it back up to normal which is polling your account every 2 minutes.

    Feel free to peruse the following threads to find out additional information about the ongoing attacks and how it is affecting *all of us*.

    http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/b1ad8dcce4781cba#

    http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/4655448e637baa81/d7d1ef0c71ff6152?lnk=raot#d7d1ef0c71ff6152

    http://status.twitter.com/

  2. henning says:

    Wow, thanks for the quick reply!

    Maybe the problem isn’t Boxcar’s at all, like you’re saying. I’ll wait a few days and see how it goes.

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