It's here! We have released our brand new SDK for Android, iOS, tvOS and HTML5 in public beta. We have substantially improved what you can do with our new set of tools for web and mobile apps.
A little background...
Back in 2012, when we first released the Notificare SDK, the goal was simple: provide apps with powerful rich and interactive notifications. That led us to focus solely on developing a SDK that could do just that.
As the years passed, our platform grew a lot and what started as a remote notification service became a powerful marketing platform with products ranging from location services, loyalty, user authentication and analytics to automation and contextual content. Although the current SDK powers thousands of apps and is running in more than 12 million devices on a daily basis, we decided it was time to change things.
What's New?
This new SDK changes some of its fundamental behaviour and it's not backwards compatible with previous versions. Basically, everything is being optimized to reflect a lot of the feedback we've gathered over the years as well as to match the current and future needs of our platform.
Managed Device Registration
We've simplified a lot of things, the most noticeable one being the fact that device registration is now managed for you. By default we will make sure a device is registered with Notificare, allowing you to use all the functionality even if you decide to not implement push notifications. This means that your app can still have a message inbox, categorize users, use location services, our loyalty solutions, actionable analytics and pretty much everything else without registering for push notifications.
Once you decide to implement push notifications, the transition is smooth and devices will instantaneously become eligible for remote notifications.
More Control Over Notifications
Based on years of feedback, we've improved the default behaviour of notifications, allowing developers to have complete control over how they are displayed and behave. This will allow you to seamlessly integrate the default UI of our notifications with the look and feel of your app, add better control to transitions and easily add actionable content in HTML messages.
Improved Inbox
Considerable improvements were added to our inbox functionality. Not only have we unified how this feature works across all platforms, we've also made sure that you get all the data you need to build a great experience for your users. Things like the title, subtitle and lock screen images are now available for you without any extra work. We've also made sure inbox messages are cached and synchronised smarter for a blazing fast experience.
Other Noteworthy Changes
We've made sure developers have more control over the functionality they use from our SDK. A great example is that iOS apps, not using Wallet functionality, no longer need to remove frameworks using compiler macros. Instead, from now one, being able to use the Wallet functionality will require developers to implement a few lines of code.
Another great, yet simple to adopt functionality, is the control over the language you register your devices to. This will allow you to provide a localized experience in any language without relying on the language your users set their phones to.
Sounds great, can I use it?
Of course, there's even a considerable amount of apps already deployed in production using this new SDK. The next phase of development will focus in integrating these changes in our non-native plugins. Although we do not foresee any major changes to this SDK, we might still release updates based on feedback from the public. As always, we remain available for all your question via our support channel.