Pushing the Limits: New Push Features

Push is growing.

Quickly.

When our Platform team last checked in with you, we’d sent a few hundred thousand push notifications during our alpha. Now, we’ve sent over a million! That’s a 200% increase each month! We’re getting real validation for the Ionic Platform, and the excitement among the team here at Ionic cannot be overstated. That said, we can’t take all the credit.

Our amazing alpha testers have been invaluable along the way. They’ve shown us where our services shine but have also given us plenty of guidance about how we could make things better. To that end, we’ve pushed out some more fantastic improvements to the Push service that will make everyone’s lives a lot easier. Let’s dive in…

Pushing Forward

We know developers use Push in a myriad of different ways, and we want every avenue to be as powerful and easy to use as possible.

• Tell everyone: This one seems pretty simple, but now you can create push notifications from the dashboard that will automatically be delivered to every user of your app. Don’t worry about re-sending them, either; you can even count on them to notify new users as they install the app!
• Choose when: Push notifications can now be scheduled for delivery at any time, from both the REST API and the Push dashboard. Simply select a date and time within our UI, or pass a timestamp in your http POST’s.
• Forget the tokens: Have users with multiple tokens? Want to target someone across all their devices? Now, you can send pushes through the REST API targeting Ionic User ID’s, in addition to device tokens. We’ll automatically send out the push to each token they’ve used, and you won’t need to keep track of their devices on your backend.

What’s Next

There will always be plenty of work to do on Push, but we’re getting closer and closer to leaving alpha every day. Here’s some of the new stuff we’ve got in the pipeline for the services:

• A modernized plugin: Currently, Push leverages PhoneGap’s push plugin. We’re working on integrating the Ionic Push plugin’s natural successor, phonegap-plugin-push. Along the way, we’ll pick up even more functionality for Ionic Push.
• Ionic User: We’re rewriting the JavaScript API for the Ionic User service, adding in a ton of new features as we go. Stay tuned for more updates on this soon in our ongoing Ionic Bonds series, which will cover new features and changes to the Ionic Platform, as well as our future plans for it.

Get Started Now

Want to jump right in? Check out our updated docs, to see how to use all the new features!