Support for Android Nougat Released

We are thrilled to announce the 1.9.0 release of our Android SDK with support for new features in Android 7.0 and support for Firebase Cloud Messaging.

What's New

With this release we've packed a considerable amount of new functionality as well as a lot of improvements in our flagship features for notifications and loyalty. To make this transition the smoothest it can be, we have prepared a migration document for developers which can be found here.

Firebase Cloud Messaging

In this new release, we've added support for FCM (which will be replacing GCM), making integration of remote notifications in Android easier than ever. You can now use Android Studio's step-by-step setup for Firebase, without ever having to leave the IDE to setup the server keys needed to make remote notifications work. If you are not ready for this change, you can of course still use good ol' Google Cloud Messaging API which we will keep supporting until it's retired.

Quickly configure your projects using the built-in FCM Tutorial for Android Studio. It has never been this easy to setup your project to implement notifications in an Android app. Easily obtain the necessary credentials needed for Notificare to start sending your push messages.

Direct Reply

In the new version of Google's mobile operating system it is possible (like it already is in iOS) to reply to notifications right from the lock screen. This is available for you by default soon you update to our new SDK release. This feature will close the gap between the functionality already available in iOS and that many of you were already using as part of your notifications.

We've seen response rates raise as high as 43% whenever these kind of actions are included in notifications, making it an efficient way of collecting feedback from your users without forcing them to open your application. It feels good to see that all the major platforms are slowly adopting our concept of smart notifications!

Loyalty

We've substantially improved our Loyalty add-on feature with this new version of the SDK. Already silently added to the 1.8 SDK, we now fully expose the same passbook functionality you already have in iOS to Android. Instead of having to rely on an extra 3rd party app, we now display and store your passes inside your app. This right away unlocks two really powerful features: receive instant updates whenever passes change and warn your users on their lock screen whenever a pass is updated or became relevant for a date, geo-location or beacon.

We also made it possible for apps to handle links to passes from web pages or emails. This allows you to distribute passes the same way you were used to in iOS.

These new features will require minimal changes in your implementation but will considerably improve your users' experience when distributing those member cards, tickets or coupons.

What are you waiting for, download our SDK now!