Overview
Silent Pushes are a type of push notification that can be sent to devices but not display a visible alert to the end user. Silent Push notifications can be useful in many types of scenarios.
Airship can send silent push notifications for some audience maintenance purposes such as delivering in-app automation payloads in the background so that they load properly when the end user triggers them. Airship also can send silent notifications to your audience for purposes of audience management and removing uninstalled devices from your audience.
There are also a variety of use cases that customers may want to take advantage of when using silent push notifications. Customers can send silent notifications to trigger a badge update or update content in your app, or indicate an Airship Message Center message has been sent.
Silent Push Use Cases
- In App Automation update and removal
- Customer may send a silent broadcast to Audience Management updates
- Content Available updates
- Badge or Message Center available updates
Caveats and possible issues
By default, our SDKs for IOS and Android properly handle and ensure silent push notifications stay silent and are never visible to end users. That said, it is important to note that it is possible to customize the Android SDK implementation in such a way where silent push notifications can be visible to end users as an empty but visible push.
If you suspect that your implementation has or will cause a visible push to appear for your users, please ensure you are following the Custom Notification Provider example in our documentation.
// do not display a notification if there is not an alert
if (UAStringUtil.isEmpty(message.getAlert())) {
return NotificationResult.cancel();
}
For iOS, silent notifications should not appear to the user by default. If you have modified your implementation to modify push content after it has been received, then it may or may not be visible depending on your implementation. If you suspect this is the case, please ensure you are following best practices for integrating the Notification Service Extension in your app.
Use Case vs Reporting
Badge Updates may not be visible to the user but will be counted as an alerting notification in our reporting data. This is because the badge update is visible to the user and is not considered to be “silent”.