Push notifications feature
Easily create, schedule, and send push notifications to your users’ devices to inform them about news and offers.
You can interact with your users by sending them daily push notifications about various topics. Push notifications aren’t the same as traditional text messages since users can choose if they want to receive them when they download and install your app.
To send push notifications, go to Push → Notification centre → NOTIFICATIONS tab and click + Create new.
From there, you can create a push notification with the following settings:
Audience
- All - send to all users
- Group - send to a specific group of users that you can create in the Groups section
Enable recurring
- enable this if you'd like a certain push notification to repeat
- set a recurring period (every day, every 7 days, or every 30 days)
Delivery date and time
- Now - push will be sent right away
- Scheduled - push will be sent on a specific date and time
- User scheduled - click here to learn more
Select what to open
- URL - a URL that will be sent as a push notification and open as an in-app web browser
- Screen - choose one of the screens of your app you wish to be opened when a user clicks on the notification
- App - the notification will launch the app which will open on the starting screen
Title
- title of the notification
- shouldn't be longer than 45 characters
Message
- a message that push notification will display - cannot contain more than 147 characters
Notification groups
To be able to send push notifications to a targeted audience, create Notification groups in the Push section → Groups tab.
You can choose the name of the group, image, and whether you'd like users to be subscribed to that group by default.
Once you’ve set up push groups, the next step would be to add Group settings as one of the screens of your app. Go to Screens → search for “Notifications” → hover over Notification center screen and choose Group settings → click to add it to the app.
Notification centre screen
On this screen, users will be able to see the push notifications that they have received. Each notification will be displayed there for 30 days, after which it will disappear.
To add it as a screen, go to Screens → search for “Notifications” → hover over Notification centre screen and choose Notification centre → click to add it to the app. Here is how this screen looks in the app:
If you delete push notifications you have sent from the builder, that doesn’t mean that those same notifications will disappear from the Notification centre in the app as well.
Why Are My Push Notifications Delayed?
Once a message has been processed by the Shoutem server, it is sent to the relevant platform’s push messaging service (for example APNS) via a third-party messaging platform such as Firebase.
Once the message is sent, Shoutem no longer has control over it – there might be a delay due to various factors.
Please note neither one of the push notification services guarantees that the message will be delivered.