Mobile Learning: A Handbook for Developers, Educators, and Learners (Wiley and SAS Business Series)

by Scott McQuiggan

Push Notification A major service offered by mobile providers is push notification. Push notification allows developers to trigger messages to users outside of the main app interface. Providers have maintained some oversight of such notifications, so developers that want to send a notification to a user must do so through the services of the mobile provider. For example, if the state of data for a particular app has changed (e.g., a teacher has posted a grade for a student, or all students have submitted their homework), an app developer may decide to notify users of such an event. The developer will then construct a notification, usually through their own services, and automatically send it to the mobile provider to be placed in a queue for the user and distributed appropriately. Push notification does require some maintenance responsibilities for the developer to ensure clean push-notification data is sustained to mobile providers and good user experiences are delivered. As with many of the software features we note, to be a good app citizen means to only use push notifications if they are appropriate; users tire quickly of having push alerts for things they do not think are important enough to justify interrupting other tasks.