Push notifications for iOS and how to effectively interact with your apps clients

Did you notice that users' mobile devices often receive small pop-up windows with a short message? These are called Push Notifications. Let's take a closer look at this technology, and understand how using it in your applications will help you realize your business ideas.

Push Notifications is an effective way to communicate with customers. Pop-up windows that appear on the screens of users of mobile devices may contain various information that relates to a specific mobile application. Clients can receive these notifications regardless of the state of the mobile application (active, in the background, not active). Most often, push notifications are informational in nature and are short and succinct messages. However, in some cases, if it is necessary to visualize information for the user, media content (image, audio, video) and action buttons are added to the message, the use of which helps to perform various actions, for example, to click on a link, open the application on the desired screen, where there is information describing in more detail the message from the push notification. And on the latest version of iOS, you can even make payments via Apple Pay directly from a push notification, just by opening it in more detail.

Thus, push notifications allow the application to inform its customers about various events, most often these events are of an urgent nature, since notifications come to the phone even in a blocked state. The diagram below shows the general operation of push notifications for devices with the iOS operating system, which shows in more detail how the process of creating, sending, receiving and displaying notifications occurs.

1 . In order for the application to receive push notifications, it is necessary to configure and register the application in the Apple Developer account, generate the necessary certificates, profile files and add them to the application

2 . iOS requests a device token from APNS (Apple Push Notification service) , which is needed to identify the device to which the push notification will be sent in the future.

3 . The application receives a device token .

4 . The application sends the device token to your server so that the server now knows where to send push notifications

5 . According to a predetermined event, the server sends push notifications to APNS with the necessary information to display the specified message format

6 . APNS, in turn, sends a push notification to the device in the application.

Basic requirements for enabling push notifications on iOS:

Features of the implementation of push notifications or what you need to be prepared for:

• They are not reliable. There is no 100% guarantee that the push notification will reach the end user on the device. The APNS server responds to your server successfully whether or not it has received the notification, and does not report in what status the user's device received the notification or did not receive the APNS. Also, there are additional factors that may prevent the user from receiving a notification: the notification function on a particular device is disabled (the user can manage this process himself), the device may be turned off or not connected to the Internet. APNS will try to deliver a push notification to the device when it becomes available for receiving notifications, but the waiting time is limited. This is the main disadvantage of Push Notifications.

• The maximum size of notifications sent to APNS should not exceed 4KB (4096 bytes).

• It is necessary to specify on the server at which events the user will receive push notifications.

What do you get when you use push notifications in the app?

• The ability to interact with the client more often, notifying him about various new products, promotions, events, thereby regularly returning him to the application.

• You increase the chance of buying your product if the advertisement/offer of this product is indicated in the notification.

• The ability to quickly hold sales or promotions among a huge number of people, as customers will receive an alert about the event almost immediately when you announce the start.

• Using the action buttons in notifications, with the ability to click on a link or deep link, will allow you to redirect customers to the screens you need inside the application.

• Customers will be able to make payments directly from the push notification via ApplePay.

• The ability to add media content in a push notification will improve the perception of the information contained in the message to the user.

• Notifying the user about a new message from his interlocutor in the chat of the mobile application.

Thus, push notifications are a very powerful tool for interacting with customers - most often, it is managing the process of returning the user to the information field you need and reminding him of important information about your product. The main thing is not to forget about this tool, it is very important for any mobile application from a marketing point of view.

Thank you for your attention and we hope that this article will help you in the development of your business.