Building Progressive Web Apps

Chapter 10. Reach Out with Push Notifications

There are few (if any) features that were as central to the gulf between native apps and web apps as the ability to send notifications to your users.

Push notifications allow users to opt in to updates from apps they care about, and to get timely updates to the content and data they need. Can you even imagine using an instant messaging app that doesn’t offer notifications?

As developers, push notifications allow us to improve our user’s experience with our apps and thus increase usage. They are perhaps more essential to our apps’ adoption by users, and their success, than perhaps any other factor.

For businesses, being able to re-engage users and bring them back to their apps over and over again has been key to increasing the value derived from each app install. This has allowed businesses to pour more and more money into user acquisition while still maintaining a positive return on investment.

It would not be an understatement to say that push notifications have been one of the biggest driving factors for the success of the native app.

But now that the web has full access to the power of push notifications, we can finally say the reverse of the statement that opened this chapter: There are few (if any) features that can be added to your web app which can have as big an impact as the ability to send notifications to your users.

Life of a Pushed Notification

We have been talking push notifications up since Chapter 1, but it is finally ...