Push: What are your options?

Push notifications are a great way to engage and communicate with your users. For example, you can highlight certain content within your app or to remind users that new content is available. Using push notifications can be a useful marketing or advertising tool too.

We currently integrate with two push notification providers out of the box: Airship and Firebase. These are third party integrations where we cover the ongoing maintenance and care of the integration at our cost as part of the Pugpig products.

We have also integrated with a number of other providers which involve custom code and set up work, please see below for more information.

Airship

We are long term partners with Airship and have recently updated our integration to include several new features. The features we support include:

• Sending image or GIF push messages
• Sending polls via push notifications
• Push notifications which take the user to a specific place in your app via deeplinking
• In app messaging (doesn't require users to opt in)
• In app automations (assuming your account level with Airship supports it. This is a really rich feature that allows you to serve in-app messages based on all sorts of triggers. See more info here. On iOS you can also use it to serve a 'soft ask' prompt for push notifications ahead of the native one)
• Pugpig's suite of events get tracked by default and with a little additional work we can send attributes from your subscription response automatically to Airship as tags. This allows you to create segments based on things like subscriber type. 
• Sending 'background' push messages which deliver content to users
• Push notification preview tool

For more information on Airship's pricing please contact them directly. 

If you already have a Pugpig app and would like to upgrade to Airship please get in touch with support@pugpig.com in order to arrange an app update.

If you're new to Pugpig, we can add Airship to your app as part of our setup process.

Firebase

Google's free service Firebase offers basic push notification capability. You will be able send text-based push notifications and background content pushes, as well as deep link and in-app messages. 

If Firebase wasn't available when you first set up your app with us, we can add Firebase to your app as part of an app update. Please reach out to your Pugpig contact to arrange this.

Other providers

If you would like to use a different provider just get in touch. In the past we have integrated with others such as Braze, Mixpanel and Exact Target. 

These are integrations we've worked with previously and typically involve custom code, cost and work to integrate. We don't regularly update to new SDK versions for these ones and if an SDK update is required the client should request and cover the cost to do so. Typically the cost will be low, however some integrations can become complex and more costly. We can usually integrate with any third party but it helps if we know it already. See more on third party integrations here.