My attempting to “understand push by reading just this article” has not yielded great results - for the most part I am confused about how it is done. With Google (I think it was Google’s new Game Services stuff) what I understood was that you specify the users who will get a push notification (how do you do that - unless you are making a database of users all along).
EDIT: plus I think I read that it is limited to 3000 users at a time - I don’t remember if this was Google or one of the other services …
Then I read something on parse.com and urbanairship.com (two of the oft-mentioned alternatives to Google Game Service’s push stuff) - and they seemed equally obtuse.
That made me wonder if the other programmer-created alternatives - where push notification is app-generated (perhaps timed to it’s time of installation, or “first notification after 3 days” etc.). And that would need some type of Alarm/BroadcastReceiver etc. stuff - seemed slightly more understandable - but again requiring examination to see which of the seeming-alternatives would be best supported.
In any case, for some things like reminders for user to use app again - or for indication that they have just “earned X amounts” and should revisit the app again - WOULD seem to be better served by an app-resident way of notification (and not a system-wide “wake-up” as a push notification from Google/urbanairship/parse would suggest. Not thought about this enough to have a clear idea yet.
HOWEVER, just saw this article some days back and have kept it for later perusal - this seemed to ACTUALLY explain how to use parse and from cursory reading seemed not too difficult to do (and has a working project which may do wonders for understanding it):
http://www.androidbegin.com/tutorial/android-parse-com-push-notification-tutorial/
Android Parse.com Push Notification Tutorial
AndroidBegin
June 15 2013
Feedback on it’s greatness/effectiveness/success as a tutorial would be appreciated.
I think Google allows use of push notification to remind user of progress/changes within the app itself. So a blatant appeal to user to use the app again could be camoflaged in any number of ways as an “alert: you have been awarded 100 coins” - or perhaps even “this new feature is now available - please update app”. That would be completely within the Google guidelines one would think.
However, such stuff should probably be used sparingly - as could rapidly piss off users - however one may only need to give say just ONE reminder to a user (for the lifetime of a user) - and that may be enough to improve stats by 20% or so (without really being an irritation to user).
A slight negative may be that a reminder to user to use the app again (even if sugar-coated as a great award/improvement) may also trigger a small percentage of users to UNINSTALL the app - not just because they don’t like notifications, but because they were reminded that “here is one app I am not really using - why am I keeping it around” (but then these users are just helping improve install/uninstall ratio which may help with Google rankings - but are not really using the app).
One possible use of app maybe to announce a new feature which would TRULY make it more desirable in users’ eyes (even for those who have installed it and then not using it).