What are push notifications?
Most users of modern mobile devices are familiar with push notifications, which alert us about appointments, chat messages, and special offers from e-commerce sites.
What makes push notifications powerful is their ability to reach users without requiring a specific app to be open. Users can see notifications even when their device is locked or an app is in the background, allowing continuous engagement.
The true potential of push notifications is realized when combined with real-time functionality, helping users stay updated and enabling marketers to engage effectively.
This guide will delve into push notifications, detailing how to implement them alongside real-time features. By the end, you'll understand how these elements complement each other and how to get started in your app.
Push notification use cases
Across mobile devices (iOS and Android) and the web, push notifications give companies a flexible and familiar way to reach their users. Whether used as on-demand push alerts or in conjunction with real-time events, they give apps a direct way to convey information and prompt user action. And because they’re so flexible, push notifications have a role to play in a broad range of use cases.
How to use push notifications to reach, remind, and re-engage your users
At their core, push notifications give apps a way to reach out to users on the device level, even if the app itself is closed or in the background. This makes them perfect for things like timers and reminders, and can ensure your app is top-of-mind for otherwise busy users.
Push notifications as reminders
Push notifications uniquely draw users back to your app, benefiting both users and companies. A telemedicine app can remind patients to take medication and log progress, improving health outcomes. Similarly, an e-commerce app can engage shoppers with personalized alerts about abandoned carts, encouraging purchases. This ability to reach users anytime makes push notifications a powerful tool for enhancing engagement and retention strategies, driving users to return and increase app usage.
Push notifications example: Game developers
Game developers use push notifications to alert players about time-bound events like tournaments, driving engagement even with inactive players. Similarly, any app (e-commerce, live events, social media) can leverage push notifications to highlight special offers or events, boosting user engagement and prompting immediate action.
Read more:Push Notifications API Examples
Use push notifications to extend real-time application interactions
Even when users aren’t actively using your app, important events can occur. Push notifications keep them connected to real-time activities, whether it's a work conversation, a doctor’s alert, or a gaming upset. Chat apps are a prime example, pushing messages for mentions and replies even when users are inactive. Beyond messaging, push alerts enhance live events by notifying fans when games start, crucial moments happen, or special offers are available.
Push notifications example: Multiplayer games
In multiplayer games, push notifications alert players to critical events like countdowns, high scores, or enemy invasions. They extend real-time activity beyond the app, keeping players engaged and offering a direct path back into the game. PubNub’s unified push gateway lets you instantly send these notifications based on real-time events, ensuring users return the moment something important happens.
When to use web or app push notifications instead of SMS text messages
Push notifications differ from SMS, a common communication method for businesses. SMS is simple and highly visible, but push notifications offer clear advantages: they’re cost-free, customizable, and allow rich content like images, unlike SMS, which is limited to plaintext. Push notifications are ideal for re-engaging app users, offering better control over the user experience and driving engagement and retention.
Types of push notifications
Up to this point, we’ve been referring to push notifications collectively. In reality, while they generally look and behave the same in any context, there are important differences in the details between iOS, Android, and web push notifications that affect how you should think about and deploy them.
Mobile push notifications
Broadly, these are the most common kind of push notifications and should be familiar to almost all mobile users.
While both iOS and Android support push notifications, there are key differences in how each mobile platform treats them. When shipping an app for both popular mobile OSes, you need to make considerations for differences in permissions and visibility for different devices:
Push notification permissions:
On both iOS and Android, users have ultimate control over which apps can send push notifications. On Android, users must opt out of notifications manually, while iOS apps must get users to opt in. The impact of this difference is that companies planning to release on Apple devices must come up with a strategy to convey the value of push notifications to their users in order to gain their trust and permission.
Push Visibility:
On mobile devices, push notifications show up on the lock screen when the phone is asleep. On iPhones, notifications disappear after unlocking but remain in the notification center, while on Android, they stay until the user interacts with or clears them. For Apple developers, this means push notifications must be engaging and relevant to prompt immediate interaction.
Web push notifications
Modern browsers like Chrome support web push notifications, letting you send customized alerts to users even when they're off your site or app. Users must opt-in first, but once enabled, these notifications work just like mobile push alerts, allowing you to engage users with relevant content, guide them back to your app, or prompt important actions.
To maximize the impact of their app, most developers will aim to launch on as many platforms as they can, but doing so effectively means managing and syncing multiple notification services. PubNub’s push notification solution reduces the complexity of supporting multiple platforms by providing a single endpoint for sending alerts. With one publish, developers can reliably send in-app alerts and trigger notifications for iOS, Android, and web.
How to implement push notifications
Push notifications are server-initiated messages sent to a user's device, unlike regular messages triggered by the user's request.
The notifications are sent via each platform’s own operating system push notification service (OSPNS). The two major services are APNS (Apple push notification service) for iOS, and FCM, or Firebase Cloud Messaging, for Android (formerly known as Google Cloud Messaging). Each of these services provides APIs that allow apps and services to trigger notifications on their respective devices.
While developers can implement each individual service themselves, this can become cumbersome and difficult to support. Communication platforms like PubNub provide a unified push notification gateway that lets developers trigger push notifications right alongside in-app messages and alerts, and to do so across all services at once. With PubNub, subscribers to real-time channels will automatically receive notifications when outside your app, no matter what device they’re on.
How to make push notifications work in real-time
Push notifications require user activity to trigger them, like cart abandonment in e-commerce.
Read more: Push notifications for eCommerce
They're most effective with real-time interactions (e.g., live chat, game scores), but syncing them with in-app alerts can be tricky. Developers must avoid spamming users with unnecessary notifications and be mindful of triggers. Using a unified push gateway, like PubNub, helps automate notifications and keeps users engaged without overwhelming them.
4o miniSetting up push notifications with PubNub
The first step is to get set up with the various notification services. To do this, developers register their app with the necessary push notification services for their target platforms. Then, they ensure that user devices that install their app also register with that service to receive notifications (this is essentially what your users are “opting in” to when they say “yes” to receiving alerts).
Then, it’s just a matter of sending the notifications, which has two parts: getting the information that will go into your notification, then sending the notification itself to the desired endpoint, whether it’s a desktop device, browser, or mobile app.
PubNub simplifies this process into a single, seamless activity, and makes it easy to automatically align your in-app and push activity. With our solutions for mobile push notifications, you don’t need to develop push notifications separately from in-app alerts or activity. Instead, our easy-to-use APIs let you automatically trigger push notifications from real-time messages for users that are offline, or have simply put your app in the background.
With PubNub, it’s easy to get push notifications up and running in your app. Our in-depth push documentation walks you through each step, but we’ll summarize the simple process right here:
- Enable the mobile push gateway feature for your app in the PubNub admin portal.
- Register your app with APNS and FCM, and add those credentials to PubNub.
- When users install your app, register that device with its respective push notification provider (ie, register iPhones with APNS, and Android phones with FCM).
- Send your notifications!
PubNub lets you define the contents of your push notification right alongside your real-time messages, so you don’t have to spend additional development time just to set up alerts, and you don’t have to worry about keeping them in sync and accurate to in-app activity. Instead, with a single message, you can reach both active and out-of-app users with engaging, relevant content.
If you’re ready to start sending relevant, real-time, and precise push notifications to your users, get in touch with us. We’ll walk you through the best way to add push notifications using our platform, and will work with you to get up and running with alerts that will inform, energize, and engage your users.
