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Push notifications

Atomic Action Flows can send mobile push notifications to your customers to re-engage them into your app.

  • Notifications can be sent when an action card is delivered or independently if no card is needed
  • Notifications can (optionally) contain a data payload that your app can use to performing deeplinking or pass into other activities in your app, and data-only notifications are supported on Android
  • iOS data-only notifications are also supported (Beta). See the iOS Data-Only Push Notifications (Beta) section below for details.
  • Notifications are intelligently rescheduled around do-no-disturb windows you set for your customers
  • Analytics covering the delivery, receipt and context of push notifications is tracked alongside all other events in Atomic, once the Atomic SDKs are installed and configured
  • Push notifications are supported in all Atomic mobile SDKs, and in the Web SDK via our Cordova wrapper

Setting up push notifications in your environment​

SDK setup​

The SDK guides for iOS, Android, Flutter, React Native, or Cordova outline the steps to configure notifications in your apps.

Workbench setup​

The push notification credentials article explains what to configure in the Atomic platform, and how to set it up via the configuration area of the workbench.

Push notification credentials can also be managed via the Notification Platforms API

iOS Data-Only Push Notifications (Beta)​

This feature allows your iOS app to receive “silent” pushes containing data for badge updates, background refreshes, or other non-visual updates. Be aware that background data-only notifications on iOS are considered low priority by the system, meaning delivery is not guaranteed, and iOS may throttle or drop them if sent too frequently.

Note: The unread counts in the “Notification Badge Settings” section must be enabled for data-only push notifications to function.

Overview​

  • Turn on the option "Send data-only notifications" when creating a new push notification configuration for iOS in the Workbench. See push notification credentials article for more information.
  • No additional set-up is required if your host app only needs to update the badge number. Even older versions of your app should continue to update the badge as expected upon receiving data-only notifications.
  • For full background behaviour, such as refreshing data in the background, additional capabilities must be enabled in the iOS app (see below).
  • Important: You must re-register the device after setting up data-only push notifications in the Atomic Workbench. The simplest method is to delete and then reinstall the app.

Host app set-up​

  1. Enable the remote notifications capability
    In Xcode, ensure that the Background Modes capability is added in your app’s Signing and Capability tab.
  2. Receive background notifications
    Implement the required delegate methods to handle data-only notifications. The iOS system treats these notifications as low priority, so they may not always be delivered immediately, particularly if your app sends them too frequently.

Refer to Apple's documentation Pushing background updates to your App for full configuration details. This document provides the complete steps for enabling and testing data-only notifications in your iOS app.

Note on limitations

iOS background notifications may be throttled if too many arrive in a short window. Apple’s guidelines suggest sending no more than two or three per hour. Use these notifications judiciously to ensure background updates occur without being suppressed.

Push notification delivery​

Atomic uses SNS for delivering push notifications. Check out the push notification delivery article to learn more about how notifications get from the Atomic platform to your users mobile devices.

Configuring your Action Flows to send push notifications​

There are two ways an Action Flow can send a push notification:

Add a 'Send a notification' step to your flow​

Adding a send a notification step your your Action Flow lets you control exactly where in the flow a notification should be sent. With this approach you don't need to be sending a card, or you can choose to send a notification at a different time to a card.

Configure a push notification as part of a card template​

When editing a card template, the Card configuration menu presents an option to send a push notification when the card is sent. By default these are disabled, to enable, click the menu item named Push disabled and update the settings.

Personalizing push notification content​

The Title and Message test of a notification can contain dynamic data. While editing, type + or click the insert context placeholder button to select and insert a context placeholder. To learn more about dynamic data and how you can use it, check out the context reference

Sending custom data in push notification payloads​

Learn more about how you can send custom data in the sending custom data in push notification payloads article

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