Push Notification
Price On RequestWe are living in the Dawn of Smartphone age. We use Smartphone while we sleep, eat, Drink and the list goes on. How would you grab the attention of your customers when they have multiple applications installed on their personal devices? Here a question arises, that is, how many applications do we use frequently? May be a favorite game, a News App, a map or a navigator, social media apps and a few more.Now if we think about it as a marketer for an app. How can we engage our customers to keep visiting our app or in simple terms how to increase traffic on our app or on our website?If on locked screen of device, if we could send a small and concise message that may delight users, then it is highly probable that they ll visit the app or redirected to the website. Or in other way, the icon of the app shows number of new updates or messages that could possibly delight the end user.This is possible with the help of introducing push notification services to the mobile application.So, what is push notification?According to Apple*, a push notification is defined as Send over-the-air alerts, such as news updates or social networking status changes. According to Google*, It allows third-party application servers to send lightweight messages to their Android applications. The messaging service is not designed for sending a lot of user content via the messages. Rather, it should be used to tell the application that there is new data on the server, so that the application can fetch it. In simple terms: Push notifications are short and light weight messages from apps installed on a device displayed on the home or lock screen of the user s phone, waking up the handset. They are generally accepted as a great way to bring app users back to your app. These notifications are pushed by Native Push Channels to the users device.Where can it be used? Gaming- Notify users of changes in league tables to encourage them to return to the app. Appeal to their competitive nature. How it works on Windows platformThere are four primary actors (Please Refer the image below), two of which are wholly responsible and two are provided by Microsoft as part of the platform: Windows Store App: is an awesome Windows 8 application Cloud Service: is responsible for two things o Keeping track of the devices/users that are running your app o The content that will be generated is pushed to a subset (typically) of those users via a tile or toast notification. Windows Notification Service (WNS): is a Microsoft-provided cloud service that is responsible for sending out the notification to the targeted clients Notification Client Platform (NCP): is a subset of the Windows 8 OS that interacts with WNS and passes the relevant notifications to the app running on the given device. Notification channel is another primary element of this workflow, it is a unique URI that identifies a single user on a single device for a single application (or secondary tile). Cloud Service is an involved and complex method, but in terms of the workflow is a black box. As long as it manages the OAuth exchange and provides a tile or toast template to WNS, all is well.Workflow of push notification in simple terms (iPhone) Each device receives Push notification from APNs through secured IP connections. If the App is not running on device and a notification arrives, the device alerts the user. The workflow of push notification is as follows- The App developer or providers create notifications in their server/s. The providers then connect with APNs via secure channel. The APNs receives the notification and pushes it to the target device.