Build the in-app messaging experience your users deserve

Madalina Grigorie — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 19:50:38 +0000

For the last year, we've been hard at work scaling our infrastructure and developing new features based on the feedback we received from more than 8,000 beta testers. Today we are excited to announce that Chatkit is generally available.

What is Chatkit?

Chatkit is a set of APIs that enables you to build bespoke in-app messaging inside your mobile and web apps. It comes with out-of-the-box features that your end users expect to see in any in-app chat such as:

typing indicators
file & images sharing
online presence
roles & permissions
read cursors

… and more, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

We've set out to build Chatkit based on the feedback of our Channels users that were fed up with the lack of extensibility and customisability of off-the-shelf solutions like Zendesk Chat and Intercom, or messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook messenger. They wanted to build a chat experience that fits their business needs and own their own data.

What's new in Chatkit

Right after the beta launch, we heard requests from developers for more SDKs in the languages you know best and love working with - so we released both new client and server SDKs. We also added some new features that bring even more out-of-the-box functionality such as:

Roles & permissions - create custom roles within your Chatkit instances to differentiate how users interact with your chat
Read cursors - track how far a user has read through the messages in a room
Instance Inspector - inspect what is happening with users, rooms, messages, and roles in your instance
Rich media support - add attachments to messages. (note: this feature is remaining in beta for now, but a general availability update is coming soon!)

We've also added some new SDKs, and updated the existing ones:

Client SDKs

iOS
JavaScript
Android

Server SDKs

Node.js
Ruby
PHP
Go

What's Next?

We have a roadmap packed with features to help you build the in-app experience your users want.

Here is a small teaser of what is coming out in the next few months:

Custom Data for Rooms
Multi-part Messages
New and improved Files API
Push notification support and fallback
Webhooks
End-to-end encryption

As always, we'd love your feedback, so let us know what you think! You can reach out to us at chatkit@pusher.com

Deliver critical transactional push notifications with Pusher Beams

Madalina Grigorie — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 12:51:44 +0000

We’re excited to announce that Pusher Beams is out of beta and generally available for your production apps!

We’re proud that over 10,000 developers are using Beams to send critical transactional notifications.

Here’s what’s included with Beams:

Unified API to deliver push notifications to iOS, Android, and MacOS devices
Hosted service to manage the device token lifecycle for iOS and Android apps
Android and iOS SDKs crafted to include the latest FCM and APNs updates
Interests to deliver notifications using a flexible pub/sub model
Insights reporting acknowledgement and open events directly from the client
Debug Console featuring a realtime notification lifecycle event log

You can try it out today, read the docs, or get started with an iOS or Android tutorial.

Gain visibility once notifications are sent

When we released a beta push notifications API, we learned that developers lack visibility after they send notifications. Neither of Apple and Google’s notifications gateways — APNs and FCM — provide delivery guarantees.

Notifications are the lifeline of applications — alerting users when deliveries are on their way, when news breaks, when a favourite player scores, or when a conference call begins — but developers are often left wondering whether notifications were delivered or opened.

When a notification is sent to a device with Beams, the client SDKs will report back an acknowledgement event once the notification is received. If the user taps the notification to open the app, the client SDKs will report back an open event.

Half of all opened Beams notifications are opened within a minute and half, demonstrating the powerful utility to reach a user wherever they are.

You can see your app’s aggregated acknowledgement and open events with Insights or as a realtime event log in Debug Console.

Stop wasting time with gateway scaffolding

APNs and FCM are free to use, but we heard from developers that building infrastructure around these gateways is headache-inducing. In fact, over 80% of Beams developers told us they tried integrating notifications directly through APNs/FCM before they started using Beams.

Here’s why you’ll save time with Beams:

3 out 4 of developers were able to get a test notification service set up with Beams in 30 minutes or less.
This summer, APNs/FCM refreshed 1 in 10 device tokens managed by Beams. Developers don’t need to worry because our SDKs keep device tokens updated behind the scenes.
The API is ready for scale. You can deliver notifications to 1 million iOS devices per minute and 1 million Android devices per 17 seconds.

At Pusher, we take pride in providing infrastructure that developers rely upon to build great apps, and we can’t wait to see what you build with Beams.

What’s next for Beams?

We plan to give developers more flexibility to target notifications to users, increase transparency for the health of their service, and improve deliverability across all your devices.

Beams has an active community of developers — special shoutout to the community supported React Native SDK — and we’re excited to hear your ideas for what we should build next!

Join the Pusher community on Slack or reach out using our Intercom chat on docs or dashboard.

If you like what you see and you’re feeling generous, help spread the word with a tweet or star our Beams iOS and Android SDKs on Github.

Forem: Madalina Grigorie

Build the in-app messaging experience your users deserve

Deliver critical transactional push notifications with Pusher Beams

Gain visibility once notifications are sent

Stop wasting time with gateway scaffolding

What’s next for Beams?