Now Pushpad supports the silent option for web push notifications. This means that you can send web push notifications that don't produce any sound or vibration when they are received.
Silent notifications can be useful to improve the user experience in different scenarios, for example:
- a news website wants to reengage the users and keep them informed without disturbing them (this is especially useful for websites that send many notifications per day)
- a web application, like a chat or a messaging app, wants to mute a specific conversation (for example a user may want to receive the notifications from a group, but doesn't want to hear a sound for every single message)
- an e-commerce website wants to send marketing campaigns that are not time-sensitive.
Basically this new feature is useful to deliver news and messages that are not time-sensitive, without disturbing the user for each notification. This may also have a positive impact on the retention rate - i.e. less users decide to unsubscribe from notifications.
Pushpad allows you to mute all the notifications for a project (from project settings) or you can enable the silent option only for specific notifications. The Pushpad dashboard, the REST API and all the libraries have been updated to support this new feature.
Note that although the silent option is defined in the Web Notifications API standard and Pushpad is fully compatible with that, browser support for this feature is still limited. In particular, at the time of writing, this feature has been tested successfully on Chrome, Edge and in general on Chromium-based browsers (desktop version). We have also opened a bug report / feature request for Chrome on Android and Firefox and we hope that they will implement this new feature soon.