iOS Web Push Notification support is coming soon in 2022

George Deglin — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 22:36:38 +0000

On January 27, 2022, Apple seeded the first Beta of iOS 15.4 featuring several updates— including one that we've been looking forward to for a long time.

iOS 15.4 is expected to introduce many new features, including support for Face ID with a Mask, new emojis, and updates to built-in apps such as Notes and AppleTV.

However, the most exciting addition is experimental support for iOS web push notifications!

The setting to enable Web Notifications support in Safari (WebKit) Preferences can be seen on an iOS 15.4 device running in the Xcode Device Simulator

Web push notifications are a popular communication channel used by more than 8% of top websites. They provide an essential mechanism for websites to send timely and personalized messages to users.

An example of Web Push notifications being used to send sports and Covid news stores on a both Windows and an Android Device

Nearly every operating system supports this valuable communication channel. Unfortunately, until recently, Apple was a significant outlier and showed little interest in allowing web push on iOS devices. In the past, Apple has faced pushback for falling behind on supporting modern web APIs, including web push.

Considering that Apple owns 52% of the mobile market in the United States and a similarly large market share worldwide, this limitation has dramatically slowed the adoption and utility of web push notifications. As a result, websites have resorted to pressuring users to download apps or provide either an email or SMS number to receive messages.

This latest addition to iOS 15.4 Beta is a promising sign that Apple will finally enable web push support in Safari on iOS and allow its use in other iOS browsers such as Chrome and Firefox.

In our tests of this new Beta capability in iOS 15.4, we've determined that web push is disabled by default, and unfortunately, enabling it does not yet work. However, this the introduction of this new option and the newly introduced iOS web push APIs are strong signs that Apple is actively working on introducing full web push support.

Although the public launch of iOS 15.4 is slated for April 2022, web push support likely won't be available until later, possibly in iOS 16. If this prediction is correct, we'll see iOS web push introduced with the public launch of iOS 16 in September 2022.

That might be a while to wait, but nonetheless we're incredibly excited for the opportunities this will unlock for better and more user-friendly mobile web experiences. The OneSignal team is following this news closely and will ensure that all OneSignal customers are prepared to seamlessly leverage web push on iOS when it's available.

Android 12 Notification Changes: What to Expect

George Deglin — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 18:00:25 +0000

Google continues to evolve Android to be more visually appealing, easier to use, faster, and more secure. A new version of the Android operating system is released each year and typically incorporates a variety of changes, including ones that affect the notification experience.

Android 12 is no different — Google is once again making several changes that will affect how developers can best reach their users with push notifications. Here’s what to expect.

1. “Custom Notification” Changes

Custom Notifications refer to notifications that use a non-standard layout. Android provides a standard template for most types of notifications, but this standard template may not meet the needs of every app.

Google’s standard notification template.

A notification with a customized layout and background

Custom notifications are a tricky feature for applications to use correctly because they must be designed to accommodate a wide range of device orientations and resolutions.

Android 12 will introduce major changes to how applications can use custom notifications. Complete customization of the notification design is no longer possible. Instead, custom notification content is limited to a customizable area within a standard notification template.

Android 12 custom notification design.

Google explains “In this way, Android 12 makes all notifications visually consistent and easy to scan, with a discoverable, familiar notification expansion for users.”

Although this change takes away some of the customizations that were previously possible, it helps provide a better overall user experience for Android users.

Google’s advises: “If your app is using fully custom notifications, we recommend testing with the new template as soon as possible”

More detail on this change is available here.

2. Notification UX Changes

Android 12 introduces several changes to the look and feel of notifications, which can be seen in the following comparison screenshots:

Left: Android 11 lock screen notifications. Right: Android 12 lock screen notifications. Top: Native App Notification with image. Center: Native App Notification without image. Bottom: Chrome Web Push Notification.

Left: Android 11 notification shade. Right: Android 12 notification shade. Top: Expanded Native App Notification with image. Center: Native App Notification without image. Bottom: Chrome Web Push Notification.

In the examples above, the top two notifications on each device are native app notification. The third notification on each device is a web push notification from the Chrome browser.

At a glance, Google has made several changes to increase whitespace around notification elements and reduce visual clutter. They’ve also softened the colors, making notifications more visually appealing. Finally, collapsed notifications take up less vertical space, and expanded notifications take up slightly more vertical space. This helps users both see more notifications at once and provides an opportunity to view greater notification detail when users expand a notification.

Another important change is that the amount of visible content in web push notifications has been shortened. It’s possible that Google will be making further changes here to increase how much text can be shown, but we still recommend that developers be mindful of not making their web push notification content too long, especially when using an image.

3. Faster, More Responsive Notifications

Android users may be familiar with cases where they click a notification but then nothing happens for a few seconds. The reason for this is that some apps use “notification trampolines”. For developers reading this, that means that they launch an intermediary broadcast receiver or service before starting the app activity itself. When using this technique, bugs in developer code can sometimes cause long delays before an app launches.

As of Android 12, Google is asking developers to migrate away from this pattern and will no longer allow it. A surprising number of applications used notification trampolining as a way to run business logic when users engaged with notifications, including many of Google’s own apps.

When Android 12 is released, older applications that still use trampolining will continue to work but a warning may be shown when users tap a notification. New applications that target Android 12 will not be permitted to use this technique and will need to update how their app handles notification events in order for their app to continue working properly.

If you’re a OneSignal user, please make sure to upgrade to our latest SDK version (4.0.0 or newer) to avoid running into any issues with trampolining. This latest SDK version improves the way the app activity is started from a notification and also simplifies the process of setting up and using the OneSignal SDK.

Android 12 is expected to be released in September 2021

Assuming Google sticks to its usual schedule, we can expect to see the official stable release of Android 12 in September 2021.

Android 12 also includes many other changes unrelated to notifications, such as improvements to security, performance, network connectivity, and more. Developers can get details on the other changes on Google’s Android 12 Behavior Changes documentation.