Exclusive interview with Getui CEO Fang Yi: Do a good job in message push step by step

From the era of Internet "quantity" to the era of mobile Internet "efficiency", mobile smart devices make full use of fragmented time and greatly improve efficiency through collaboration, cooperation, and instant resource matching. However, since 2013, the first year of China's mobile Internet marketing, people have a deeper understanding of mobile Internet and have a higher demand for technical services.

With the rise of mobile development and the maturity of cloud service technology, push notifications have become a bridge between users and developers and operators, which not only allows users to receive notifications anytime and anywhere, but also helps enterprises develop applications to increase user activity and obtain valuable data feedback. However, among thousands of messages, how can we "push valuable information to the right users in a timely and accurate manner at the right time and in the right scenario"? With this question, we invited Fang Yi, the founder and CEO of Getui, to talk about Getui's solutions in high-concurrency environments and Getui's latest leading technologies.

How can manufacturers push content themselves?

Generally speaking, when manufacturers want to push messages themselves, they mostly do so based on the xmpp protocol, so they can only support 1,000+ concurrent long connections on a single machine, which is pitifully small compared to the number of mobile terminals today. When interviewing Fang Yi, the reporter learned: "For applications with a small number of users, 1,000+ concurrent long connections may not require much equipment and cost. However, if the number of concurrent users exceeds 100,000, the cost of push messages may exceed the proportion that the App's own business investment can bear. Because mobile phones are different from PCs, the issue of traffic consumption must also be considered. The xmpp protocol itself is too heavy. It is mainly designed for IM and interconnection between systems, and is not suitable for mobile apps, so it is generally more appropriate to use a streamlined protocol."

During the interview, the reporter learned that Getui's push service is built on a typical high-concurrency distributed Internet platform architecture. It not only needs to consider the number of concurrent access devices of a single device, but also the internal high throughput, large number of reconnections per second under mobile network conditions, authentication and other processing issues. In addition, it is necessary to extract questions for users under different combinations of conditions. And everyone may be more concerned about the high-concurrency access technology of a single device, which needs to be optimized from various aspects such as hardware devices, network cards, operating systems, development languages, thread models, asynchronous processing, data structures, and protocol design. Overall, achieving large-scale push is not achieved overnight.

In the process of large-scale push, it is very easy to cause the phenomenon of undelivered or delayed messages. For users, not receiving messages does not have much impact, but for manufacturers, every push message will be a business opportunity, so the arrival rate and stability are what they are most concerned about.

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Fang Yi, Founder and CEO of Getui

Independent channel guarantees 99.9% delivery rate

It is understood that in terms of push arrival rate, Getui has an independent channel supply, with a sending rate of 200,000 per second. The arrival rate is conservatively estimated to be 99%, with a delay of less than 250ms. The stable performance has also been unanimously praised by partners.

Fang Yi believes that today's developers are very smart and cautious. They will conduct multiple investigations and monitoring to ensure that the push notifications connected to their products are the most beneficial to them. At the same time, through major forums, we can see that developers or development teams are quite satisfied with the performance of Getui.

On the day of Double Eleven, more than 3 billion messages were sent through the Getui system! This number doubled the average number of messages sent on a daily basis, which directly proved the strength of Getui. Fang Yi also added: "On that day, all colleagues responsible for technical operations were on call 24 hours a day, monitoring the data at all times. In the end, the Getui system lived up to expectations and was in an efficient and stable operating state. The e-commerce platforms connected to Getui were able to reach their users in a very timely manner."

Why does Getui have such an outstanding performance? We have to start from 2011.

2011 to present: one step at a time

The company started developing a product called "GeXin" in 2010. "GeXin" is a free chat software that integrates SMS and instant messaging, and is cross-communication operators and operating system platforms. Its technology is based on the push function. Later, Getui extracted this core technology and specialized in message push, which led to the current "Getui".

With the foundation of "Getui" and mastering the core technology of push, Getui became the earliest technical service provider specializing in push in China. During 2011-2012, it first provided customized services for Sina Weibo, and then opened the push system to the public in October 2012, allowing developers and enterprises to directly access and use it.

So far, Getui has provided mobile SDKs for platforms such as Android, iOS, and PhoneGap, and will support WindowsPhone, APICloud, etc. in the future. Of course, Getui provides jar or lib libraries, and mobile applications can directly call the API. In addition, Getui also provides server-side SDKs that support Java/PHP/C#/Python languages, mainly to facilitate developers to quickly integrate S2S. If users push without S2S integration, Getui also provides a rich operation interface on the developer website, with the same functions as those provided by the SDK.

For iOS, Getui provides a faster way. Even if the SDK for iOS is not integrated on the App side, push can be performed through APNS. For developers, they only need to submit push requests to Getui, without having to handle different platforms separately. In general, Getui's SDK package is small and flexible, and can be integrated and launched within one day. There are also dedicated people responsible for docking, providing developers with a convenient and fast channel.

PPTV Success Stories

Everyone is very familiar with PPTV. This product has been cooperating with Getui for nearly two years, covering more than 100 million users. According to PPTV's preliminary statistics, a single push message in the Getui push system can cover 30 million to 50 million users, and the daily active users (including actions such as starting and playing) have increased by at least 20%. These are relatively conservative statistics, and the effect is actually far more than that.

In addition, products with a user base of over 10 million, including Moji Weather, Changba, Tiantian Dongting, and Qunar, also have great demand for precise push services. After cooperating with Getui, user activity has increased significantly.

In today's push notification field, it is difficult for a general team to build a message push platform on their own to ensure a stable and efficient push environment under a large number of users. In the past few years of research and development, the Getui team has continuously added new modules and functions, from the earlier incremental updates, two-way links, multi-channel merging and other functions, to the Getui 2.0 product Smart Push launched this year, which specializes in precise push technology (label classification based on user attributes, and finding the most accurate group of people through A/B testing). With high-quality technical support, it also saves more than 90% of costs for enterprises and developers. At the end of the interview, Fang Yi also revealed that the next version of Getui will be based on LBS for more precise and detailed message push.