What is a push notification?
A push notification is a message that pops up on a mobile device. Push notifications can be sent at any time. Users don’t have to be in the app or using their devices to receive them.
Push notifications look like SMS text messages and mobile alerts, but they only reach users who have installed the Traffio app.
Who receives push notifications?
Push notifications are sent to people who have the app installed on one or more of their devices. This is automatic, and there is no way to turn push notifications on or off for specific people.
When they first open the app, it will ask them whether or not they will allow push notifications from us. If they choose yes, everything else is automatically set up. If they choose no, they will not receive any notifications.
They can also change these permissions in their phone settings after the fact, so if someone suddenly no longer receives notifications, one reason could be that they no longer allow us to send any.
What if someone uninstalls the app?
When the app is uninstalled on Android or iOS, Google or Apple are notified of this. When Traffio then tries to send a notification to the device that used to have Traffio installed:
Google and Apple will reject the message
Traffio will delete the device from our database so that the message doesn't keep trying to send.
The request will send to any other devices the user may be logged into. If there aren’t any other ones, the message will fall back to the user’s preferred contact method and send them an SMS and/or E-mail instead.
What if someone is logged into multiple accounts in their app?
Users can work for multiple companies, which means they will have multiple logins. The app supports this just fine and will receive push notifications from each company that uses them.
Tapping on a notification should open the app and switch to the correct company that the message originated from.
What happens when a push notification fails to deliver?
Notifications that fail to deliver are automatically followed up through the recipient’s preferred contact method on their profile. This kicks in for any message marked as “Sent“ but did not turn into “Delivered“ after an extended time.
This does not apply to every type of notification. Notifications that are followed-up through this mechanism are:
Job requests
Job cancellations
“You were moved to another booking” messages
You can configure how long Traffio is supposed to wait before following up. More on that in the Available configs section below.
Delivery status
When a message is sent out, it is marked as “Sent“ in the booking’s History tab. When the app receives the message, it sends a confirmation message back to Traffio, marked as delivered.
On Android, if a user does not have the app running, it is automatically started in the background. The push notification is shown, and delivery confirmation is sent back to us.
On iOS, the message is delivered to Notification Center, not to the app. Unless the user has the app running, delivery confirmations are not sent back to us until the user opens the app. If they delete the notification from Notification Center before opening the app, it may never send the delivery confirmation. Android is much more reliable in that sense.
Available configs
Two configs are available relating to push notifications:
Enable push notifications - enabled by default, can be turned off to disable push notifications for the entire business.
Push notification follow-up after x minutes - default 60 minutes.