Push notifications, explained without the jargon

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Here is push notifications without the vocabulary that usually surrounds it.

The version of the app your customers are running is rarely the one you just shipped. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

The short version

Permission is granted once and revoked forever. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Why people complicate it

Most of the confusion comes from tooling rather than from the idea itself. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one.

Notify about things people asked for, not things you want to say. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

What to do next

Deep link into the exact screen the notification is about. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

The short version

Mobile releases are slower to correct than web ones, so the cost of shipping a mistake is higher. Three things worth confirming about push notifications before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Permission is granted once and revoked forever — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.