Did you know that one in four of installed apps are never used.
In fact, only 26% of apps are used daily,
which means that the majority of apps just sit there.
If your app is one of the unlucky ones,
I've got good news for you.
You can improve user engagement by reminding users
to come back to your app with Google Cloud Messaging
notifications.
In my experience, the best way to learn GCM
is by running the sample code.
So in this video, I will show you
how you can use an open source project called
the GCM Playground to get started quickly.
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Hi.
I'm Jarek Wilkiewicz.
In this series, I'm covering things
every developer needs to understand
to be successful-- user acquisition, engagement,
and earning money.
In this episode, we'll focus on user engagement.
As you saw in the previous video in this series,
driving installs is what developers
need to focus on first.
But you can do much more than that.
You see, users abandon apps quite rapidly.
When asked, 34% of them report they stop using apps
because they lost interest.
So how can you entice your users to get back into your app?
User research shows that notifications work very well.
Sending a notification to the user
with a discount or a coupon, a deep link
to bonus content, a friend or family update,
or a cool new feature announcement,
are all great ways to get continued engagement
for your app.
According to Localytics, app users with notifications
enabled used the app more often than users with notifications
disabled.
This begs two questions-- how often can you
pop a notification?
And how do you implement notifications?
First of all, pick the right frequency.
Make sure your notifications are relevant and targeted.
Marketers from leading brands send notifications
somewhere between one notification per month
to one per week.
Secondly, use a reliable cloud infrastructure
so your messages don't get lost in transit.
So how do you implement notifications?
There are three parts to it.
First, you need the business logic
to decide what to send, to which users and when.
Typically, this runs in a separate backend application
server and is specific to your application.
Second, you need the transport layer
to efficiently push messages to millions of devices.
Third, your app should handle processing
of incoming notifications.
The first part is something you will need to build yourself.
But later in the video I will show you how to get started.
Google Cloud Messaging takes care of the middle part.
You know, the one that efficiently
pushes messages to millions of devices?
For the third part, GCM can display notifications for you
automatically, or you can implement your own display
logic.
Let's now talk about message delivery.
When you want to send app notification to your users,
with GCM, you don't have to worry about managing client app
connections to your app server.
The message is sent from your app server
and received by GCM connection servers,
and reliably delivered to your app.
GCM supports server to device messaging, subscription
based topic messaging, and even upstream messaging
from the client back to the app server.
App stream messages can be used for, for example,
automatically dismissing notifications
on other devices belonging to the same user.
GCM supports notifications for Android, iOS,
and even Chrome clients.
When a message from GCM Connection server arrives,
your app can display it as an in-app notification,
or, if the app is not in the foreground,
the notifications is displayed in the notification tray.
In my experience, the best way to understand GCM
is to take a look at the sample code.
We have provided it and two examples
in the GCM Playground open source project, which
you can clone from GitHub.
The GCM Playground comes with a web
UI you can use to send notifications from a sample
Go backend app server to Android, iOS, and Chrome
clients.
The GCM Playground uses Docker containers
to package the examples with their dependencies.
So it is easy to get started.
Here is an example sequence.
Once you've built and launched the example Docker containers,
go to the web UI to send notification.
The notification is delivered to the sample application server
and distributed to the registered Android, iOS,
and Chrome clients through GCM connection servers.
In a real life application, the server
is the component you would integrate with your application
specific targeting logic.
The GCM Playground makes it easier
by providing most of the application server
GCM integration code as a part of the GCM Go library, which
you can use in your own app server.
Thank you for watching.
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