Show HN: Insights into billions of daily smartphone notifications | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Insights into billions of daily smartphone notifications

batch.com

Hello HN. Founder here. Happy to answer any questions.

In a nutshell: I was inspired to build this service after the AppGratis/Apple disagreement back in 2013 where most of the controversy revolved around our supposed "abuse of push notifications" (Guideline 5.6, in Apple's book).

What happened next made me realize how important notifications were going to be: it's the next interface for users, while developers rely on them entirely for growth and engagement. But until today there was no analytics service dedicated to this new medium, which is what we're trying to build with Batch Insights.

Hope you'll like it.

> made me realize how important notifications were going to be: it's the next interface for users

Hi Simon. Why do you think that pn will be so important? I have Cyanogenmod without google apps, and I don't miss pn one bit. I understand that I am not the typical user, but what do you see in pn that I don't?

First off, for studying apps behaviors over the past months we've observed some pretty interesting content strategies: marketers and content producers are hard at work on making notifications are more polished experience. Then, platforms are pushing notifications forward, they know it creates addictions for both developers and users so they're likely to invest more there in the future. It's becoming the interface for users. For developers, it's growth + engagement. Eventually, notifications formats themselves are evolving: richer, with images, with more characters, with more elaborate call to actions, etc. I'll think we'll see some interesting innovations in this space in the next 18/24 months.

I'm still totally with you on Cyanogenmod with no pn. As someone wrote earlier today on the Internet: 'I miss the good old days of being AFK'.

How is push notification different from an SMS or a call?

I don't have all of them on vibration, they don't all have the same importance to me but mostly it's just another way of communication. When I receive an email, I wan't to know it, when someone contact me on Skype or Facebook, I wan't to know it too.

If I don't wan't to be disturb, I just press volume down and the vibration is off.

I think I'm missing something. Does Urban Airship not provide an analytics service to their customers about the effectiveness of their push campaigns?

I'm sure they do – what we're trying to do is have a more holistic approach by looking at all apps!

Urban Airship provides a suite of reports to reveal the effectiveness of each of your messages. UA also offers custom events for ROI analysis as well as A/B testing.

How do you deal with apps that have in-app preferences to toggle certain notifications on/off? Or is this just for notifications that are enabled by default?

I don't understand what this does or how it works.

"Using a new proprietary indexing technology, Batch is on a mission to track all the push notifications in the world and make them available in a centralized and unified place."

Can you track push notifications that are being sent by other applications? If so, how do you do that? Are you running a bunch of Android and iOS devices, installing apps, subscribing to push notifications in them and then gathering data that way? Or do you have a library that developers have to include in their applications?

Answer below on what is does. We address some specific demographics so it's not necessarily something useful for you if you're not in mobile dev/product/marketing.

"Are you running a bunch of Android and iOS devices, installing apps, subscribing to push notifications in them and then gathering data that way?"

That's the basic idea except that we use virtual machines mostly, combined with some hardware components.

Assuming your approach to gathering data is similar to the other guesses in this thread, your stats will be skewed for "pushers" who actually target their notifications, as opposed to sending a homogenous marketing blast. People who target their notifications (to a geoloc, or topic of interest for example) are going to be incorrectly represented here.

I helped writing a post on business insider about push notifications acceptance rate http://www.businessinsider.com.au/push-notifications-study-2... . I hope these guys will be able to confirm this 40% acceptance rate

This is great - we are building our notification strategy right now. What would your top benchmarks be? Like the three most polished experiences and strategies with notifications? (We're in digital content distribution fyi). Thanks!

What's your category exactly? Happy to look into it for you.

Looks interesting! I'd love to hear more about your ideal use case. Who can benefit from it? I browsed through the site and was left unsure of who exactly is going to use it. Any hints?

Good question!

There is a lot of work to be done to improve the quality, uniqueness, and usefulness of mobile notifications. Before Batch Insights, there was no way to get a comprehensive view of the notifications sent by gaming/m-commerce co's or news outlets. Now, as a marketer, product manager, or developer you can use Batch Insights to become inspired and develop a more effective and differentiated strategy.

There are a lot of unanswered questions about the industry's use of mobile notifications, such as:

1. In the media industry, were you first to broadcast the news on Ferguson. See > https://batch.com/insights/all?language=en&search=ferguson%2...

2. How is your competition using notifications? Track a specific vertical such as games and monitor them in real-time or follow custom groupings of the apps that matter to you. See > https://batch.com/insights/all?category=games&language=en

3. In gaming, some use incentivized notifications to reengage, others try to make you feel sorry. What's your strategy?

4. How unique is your message from day to day? Which days are most popular for certain messages? You can view statistics on the content of your notifications, as well as others'. See > https://batch.com/insights/app/ios/inside-com-breaking-news

Being mobile developers ourselves we've been dying to know. Batch Insights tries to answer these questions.

The story behind this project is awesome. Built by the team behind AppGratis which got huge and was then shut down by Apple. They're now back full steam with this project.

Just read the backstory. What a bunch of crap on apples part.

Great vision and execution. I would love for their search field to be instant (ie. no return keypress required), would improve discoverability/serendipity.

That we can certainly add very quickly – thx for the great suggestion.

Hey, I've used the tool a bit and love how easy it is to pull data from a specific app to identify push notifications patterns.

Is there any way for me to look for "All push notifications sent in the past month by App X on Android" for example ?

Easy, just go to an app page. Say, Inside for example:

iOS – https://batch.com/insights/app/ios/inside-com-breaking-news

Android – https://batch.com/insights/app/android/inside-com

And you'll have a lot of statistics there, such as the average number of words / characters used in all of their push notifications, frequency etc. That's really useful to get an overview.

Looks interesting. I would be curious to know how you guys track notifications? Did you have to jail break the iPhone?

I'm guessing a rooted phone, loaded with all the apps they can get that have notifications, and a custom scraper.

Where do you get this information from?

Very cool. Do you have any information about pushes other than the content of the push itself?

We're working on getting destination link/deeplink + open rate + conversion rate next. But before that we have a lot of advanced analytics features to build on top of the content itself. Product roadmap is quite packed!

Are you using ANCS to capture the notifications?

Nop :)

"Show HN" requires that there be something users can try out and use now. The website makes it seem like this hasn't launched yet, so we took Show HN out of the title. If that's wrong, we'll put it back.

I believe that's a mistake: we link to a special page (https://batch.com/insights/hn) made specifically for HN readers that lets anyone sign-up instantly and access 100% of the features we've built as of today.

EDIT: looks like it's our special page wording that caused the confusion – we're updating it right now.

Ok, we'll put "Show HN" back.

Much appreciated. We've also made our top banner wording more explicit. Thx.

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