If you had certain scale assurances—a set number of apps you're sending to, never more than low-five-figures pushes in a batch, never overlapping sends at the s

If you had certain scale assurances—a set number of apps you're sending to, never more than low-five-figures pushes in a batch, never overlapping sends at the same time, et c.—it could be a lot simpler because you could skip most of the queue management work, so sure, for some workloads and usage patterns UA probably wasn't helpful enough to be worth the money. It wasn't for us, either, but that's because we needed to charge for it and couldn't mark it up even higher than UA already did. [EDIT] Now, somewhat after that 2010 date, maybe 2012 or 2013 IIRC, UA re-structured their pricing and offering a ton which made them even less appealing to us, since their focus seemed to be value-add features for marketers on top of push, which was something we had no use for whatsoever—it's possible that by then they were indeed more trouble than they were worth if you just needed push messaging, even putting aside the cost of the service itself. If your marketing folks were big on using that as a "channel", though, it was probably very much worth it. They had a lot of features for that kind of thing.