Apple has announced new updates for Push notifications aimed at helping users stay focused and avoid unnecessary interruptions. For more details on all the changes concerning iOS 15, MoEngage Blog on iOS 15 Push Notifications. We've discussed the changes in the sections below.
New Focus mode and an Interruptions API
Focus is a new feature that filters notifications and apps based on what the user wants to focus on. To reduce distractions, users can set a custom Focus or a suggested Focus like Work or Sleep.
How does it affect you?
The notification framework has a new interruptions API that allows marketers to define how and when to deliver the notifications. Four interruption levels are defined as follows:
| Interruption Level | Description | Use case | Break-through focus mode |
|---|---|---|---|
| Passive | Delivered Quietly will directly appear on the Device Notification Center. | Non-urgent notifications like product recommendations or new feature updates | NO |
| Active | Default Behaviour, depending on the focus mode or notification-summary setting, the notification may or may not be delivered quietly. | News updates or weather forecast | NO |
| Time Sensitive | Can break through the focus-mode / notification-summary setting and will be delivered prominently with sound. |
Banking transaction updates or an e-commerce order delivery update
|
YES |
| Critical | It is similar to Time Sensitive, but the notification will have a sound even when the phone is in silent mode. | Extremely important alerts like a storm warning | YES |
Critical alerts (which can also break through silent mode and Do Not Disturb) require a special entitlement that you must obtain from Apple, and they are meant for very important notifications such as health alerts or security alarms.
What MoEngage is doing about it?
You can set the notification interruption level in the Advanced tab of Step 3 while creating the campaign.
Use the Time-Sensitive option cautiously because the first time a user receives a Time-Sensitive notification, the system will prompt them to keep or turn off future Time-Sensitive notifications from that brand. So if you are not sure, use Active or Passive notifications.
SDK update is not required to use this feature. However, you need to add the Time Sensitive Notifications capability in the app Xcode.
New Notification Summary
Notifications from a certain app can be delivered as a summary at a pre-set time in the day. This is to reduce the interruptions from active notifications during the day. Apple also introduced a ‘Relevance’ API that assigns a score between 0 and 1 to the notifications, so they can be presented in that respective order in the summary.
Within the notification summary, iOS 15.0 contains on-device intelligence to order the summary as per the user’s interactions with the apps. More frequently used apps will be provided higher priority.
What MoEngage is doing about it?
You can set the Relevance Score of a notification by entering any value between 0 to 1 in the Advanced tab. The relevance score for the most important message should be 1, whereas the least important message should be 0. For a notification with medium importance, you can set it as 0.5.
If you send multiple push notifications in a day, the notification with the highest relevance score will be displayed on the top among the notifications from your app in the Notification Summary.
SDK update is not required to use the feature.