Google’s Android 13 OS release (scheduled for August–September 2022) will introduce a major change in how users manage their notification preferences. Instead of enabling push notifications by default for any user who installs your app, users must explicitly consent to receive push notifications from your app before they can be sent to them.
This means that the reach and effectiveness of your push campaigns will diminish unless you’re prepared.
Let’s first understand how your push campaign would work for a user on an Android 13 device, and note the differences with respect to the versions of Android OS that are currently available.
This means that as more users begin to use Android 13, the number of users who can receive push notifications will start to drop unless you urge them to explicitly consent to receive push notifications for your app.
We have been working to assemble a series of steps that will equip you to continue delivering push notifications to your users. Here are the changes that we recommend:
Blueshift’s Android SDK has already been updated to adjust to the Android 13 changes.
Targeting your app for the Android 13 OS will allow you to display the push notification permission dialog from within your app and to also control when to do so. This will significantly reduce user friction, since users won’t need to navigate out of your app to the phone’s ‘Settings’ in order to enable push notifications for your app.
Since Google’s changes will only impact users who upgrade to Android 13, you will need to create a triggered campaign targeting these users.
Identify users who have upgraded to or recently installed Android 13, but have not explicitly consented to receiving push notifications from your app. Use the following user attributes and logic to create your segment:
In your in-app template, set the context for sending the push notifications.
Launch a continuously running segment-triggered campaign to target Android 13 users.
Google will allow you to display the push notification preferences dialog up to two times from inside your app. If the user does not opt-in within these two occurrences, they will need to navigate to the phone’s ‘Settings’ in order to enable push notifications to your app. For this reason, it is important that you know which users don’t opt in the first time so that you can urge them to opt-in one more time.
You can monitor the ‘send’, ‘click’ and ‘dismiss’ metrics for the campaign to understand how many users who met your target criteria received your campaign, how many of them opted in for push notifications, and how many declined respectively.
Blueshift’s in-app messaging feature offers a frictionless way of communicating with your users when they are already inside your app. You can reach out to your CSM to enable this feature.
In the absence of in-app messaging, your mobile developers can leverage the following helper method in Blueshift’s latest Android SDK.
Blueshift.requestPushNotificationPermission(context);
This will display the push notification preferences dialog inside your app similar to the in-app permission request.
