In Terms of Forward-Thinking Features, Don’t Forget About Push Notifications

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In many ways, success in mobile application development requires you to always keep at least one eye permanently fixed on the future. The mobile platform by its very nature is incredibly trend based, as hardware and software manufacturers alike always race to be the first to innovate with such a powerful little tool. In terms of the types of forward-thinking features that will absolutely benefit your end users, one such option you absolutely DON’T want to forget the next time you design a project involves push notifications.

What Are Push Notifications?

Push Notifications mobile app developmentTo boil the concept down to its most bare essentials, a push notification is simply any message that pops up on a mobile device, regardless of the type of activity that a user is engaged in. It’s similar in concept to the “pop up” boxes that desktop and laptop users have been dealing with for years, only push notifications aren’t advertisements at all. They’re contents that can be alert-based in nature that the user has specifically requested to see. If there’s a new version of a particular app, a push notification may appear. If you have push notifications enabled in your “News” app, you might get an update on a late-breaking story – regardless of whether or not you were actually using the app at the time.

The Benefits of Push Notifications and Mobile App Development

Perhaps the biggest benefit that push notifications bring to the table in terms of your end users is one of engagement. So long as push notifications are enabled, users don’t actually have to be interacting with your application to engage with it, which is a massive benefit when it comes to long-term use.

Push notifications are also a great way to make the user experience more personalized, particularly thanks to the fact that users have to make the decision whether or not they actually want to receive these notifications soon after installation. Depending on the type of content you’ve decided to show them, they can still get a high quality experience from your end product even if they only open up the app and take a look around once a week or so. This is the type of benefit that is completely unique to the mobile platform and the application development market is truly stronger because of it.

Much of your success in terms of push notifications will ultimately come down to how you plan on using it. Even though push notifications are not advertising-based in nature, they can still be considered SPAM by end users (and therefore harm adoption of your product) if you send them too often. For the best results, limit the use of push notifications to mission-critical, need-to-know information. Again, a news application sending a push notification about someone dropping out of or entering the 2016 presidential election race would be welcomed by users. Push notifications from the same app reminding people to rate it in the iTunes App Store would have essentially the opposite effect.

One of the challenges when it comes to designing push notifications is that this is a process that needs to be started early on in the development lifecycle. While it is always possible to add in push notifications after the fact, it’s a feature that is so engrained to the very foundation of the software itself that it’s best to add this particular feature in sooner rather than later. In terms of the engagement gains alone, however, most custom app developers will find the extra effort more than worth it in the long run.

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