When push notifications is worth the effort

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Push notifications is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

You do not control the device, the network, or the operating system version, and the design has to accept that. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

When it is worth it

Permission is granted once and revoked forever. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly.

How to decide

Deep link into the exact screen the notification is about. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

What this looks like day to day

The version of the app your customers are running is rarely the one you just shipped. Three things worth confirming about push notifications before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Deep link into the exact screen the notification is about — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.