[ben_jones]

Most concise summary of Layer I could find on the internet quickly.

> Layer is an amazingly elegant and light-weight solution for video communication. Layer is currently in a private beta primarily focused on Video, Voice and Chat on Android and iPhone. [1]

Comment was in 2014.

[1]: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-PubNub-...

[blakewatters]

Blake from Layer here: I'll definitely share your feedback with the product and marketing teams. Here's my version of a summary for a developer-centric audience:

Layer provides a comprehensive platform for adding rich messaging experiences inside other products. You can think of our offering as similar to iMessage or Facebook Messenger as a library / platform. We provide native SDKs on iOS and Android that provide a high-level development experience for implementing messaging. The SDK abstracts away all the low level details of implementing a great messaging system on mobile such as content synchronization and managing a persistent connection while still providing the developer with full control over the user experience. We also offer an open source UI toolkit called Atlas that provides a reference UI implementation on iOS and Android.

In addition to our mobile offering, we also provide a Javascript SDK for browser clients as well as raw REST and WebSocket APIs for other platforms. There is also a rich set of integration APIs in the form of backend to backend REST APIs and Webhooks for tracking events within the system.

The platform is fully managed and offered as a service. Historically our availability has been very strong, but last night exposed an achilles heal and we are working quickly to remediate the issues exposed.

[JasonSage]

If you just go to layer.com, the first text you see on the page does a pretty good job of spelling out what it is. At least, it did for me. It's also more up-to-date than that comment, it would seem.

[tschellenbach]

Layer is just a building block for adding chat to your app. Similar to how you would use Elastic for search or Sendgrid for email.

[jameskegel]

That reminds me, I wonder what ever came of the Adria Richards v. Sendgrid issue.

[ben_jones]

> Everything you need, from UI to infrastructure, to boost retention, engagement or drive transactions with the power of rich messaging.

Wasn't enough for me. And if you click "Learn more" it's more marketing drivel. Granted my quora quote isn't much better.

[blakewatters]

Blake from Layer here. Have you taken a look at our developer documentation on developer.layer.com? I felt like we did a pretty good job of presenting the product capabilities. Our homepage and the developer documentation speak to different audiences. Let us know how the developer side matches up to your expectations.