[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.