This guide will show you how to create push messages for your apps. Push messages are messages sent to the reader’s device shown on the lock screen or message center of the device. The app doesn’t have to be open to receive a push message, but the reader has to accept to receive messages from the app. Push messages are often used to inform the reader that a new issue is ready for download and for telling the most important news stories of today’s issue. When the reader opens the push message, the app will open.
Active level
Before you start, make sure you are on the the level of your organization where push for the individual apps is configured. This will typically be a main account, and you will be informed if that is not correctly chosen - either with the message "You have selected a title which doesn't have access to Push Messages. Please select a child title to access this feature" or the message "You have selected a title which doesn't have access to Push Messages"
To create a new push message, press the “PUSH MESSAGES” card on your dashboard.
On the following screen, you can create your message.
Select Platform Apps
Click the SELECT APPS dropdown menu and select android, iOS or both.
Note: your organization might have developer apps as in the example below. Make sure to select the correct platforms.
In this step you select which titles to push message to.
As default all titles are selected, so if you only have 1 title in your organization or you wish to push to all titles, then you can skip this step.
Otherwise, click SELECT TITLES dropdown menu and deselect the titles you don't want to send push message to.
You also have the option to select "newest app" or "all but newest app", but that is not shown in the image.
Your Push message will show to those of the readers who allowed push notifications, within the selected apps and titles. If you have a region picker, it will be shown for the title which was the latest to be selected by the reader - unless you have a custom solution allowing targeting several titles at the same time.
Write Message
Enter your push message as marked below. It cannot contain more than 255 characters.
Insert URL
By inserting a URL you can direct the reader to a website instead of into the app. This is optional.
You can link directly to the front page or inside a publication by using Deep Linking. Guide can be found here. The links are specific for Android and iOS. If you want to send out push messages with Deep Linking, make sure you only send an Android link to Android users and iOS link to iOS users. Not same link to all users.
Date and Time
Set a date and time for delivery of your message. If the time you have set has passed, the message will be sent to the app 5 minutes after pressing the “SEND” button. This way you have five minutes to correct any errors.
After clicking SEND, the message will be set in a queue as shown below.
You can delete or modify the message as long as status is “queued” (yellow indicator). When the message is sent, there is no going back.
At the chosen time, your message will automatically be sent and its status will change from queued to delivered as shown below (green indicator).
Delivered messages figure in a list as a history of all the sent messages.
Each push message will include an amount of recipients, some with a (i) icon which signifies it was not sent to all available titles. Each line also indicates which platforms the push message was sent to.
How to target specific versions of the app:
Note: You shouldn't try to send messages to both iOS and Android within the same push-message(works much better, when you do one OS at a time).
A useful tool to promote a new version of an app, is to use the push message feature in the Publishing Hub. With this tool you can target earlier versions of the app, and send push messages containing links to the newest version of the app.
To access the tool, you go to the app's push message section in the Publishing Hub. A push message tool will appear. Toggle the top dropdown menu(above the "all titles" dropdown menu) in the push message box.
This dropdown menu has all the versions of the app for both Android and iOS. To target specific versions of the app, deselect all the newest versions of the app(by clicking on them). Remember to only do one OS push message at a time(not both within the same push message).
With the earlier versions targeted, go find the link to the newest app(iOS-app store or Google play), and paste it into the "website to open on click(optional)" word/link-box. After this you can write the push message itself in the textbox above.
Your push message is now ready to go!
Restrictions
Push messages are limited to one message per title, every 10 minutes. If a push message is sent to a title and you try to send a second message within 10 minutes to the same title, you will get an error. Also, you can't send push messages back in time. This will also result in an error.
Push Message Receivers
Not all users will receive the push message. The message is limited to the selected title and platform. If you have Region Picker in your app the message will only be shown on a users most recently selected region.
Push messages can also be disabled by the user, so even if the user is on the relevant title, platform and region, it is no guarantee that user will receive the push message.
The listed number is the amount of users we attempt to send a push message to. There can be several reasons for not equally amount of users receive a push message:
- App is uninstalled (we check apps registered the last 30 days)
- Push can be disabled on OS level and the app doesn't have that info
- App can get a new push-token and didn't deregister the old one
- Device can be offline and we have a timeout for the push (based on Google/Apples API)
- Device can use a power-saving mode that affects receiving push messages
- Other stuff done by Apple/Google that we can't control
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