Customize Push Notification Functionality for Android Apps

The MobilePush Android SDK offers extensive customization options for notifications through the NotificationCustomizationOptions class. The example provided in the Initialize the SDK section of the Android Quickstart Guide depicts the basic configuration, requiring only the Small Icon Resource ID to be provided to the SDK. This example represents only the minimum configuration needed for displaying notifications on your Android apps with the SDK. For information on status bar icons, see Icons in Google's Material Design documentation.

You can further customize push notifications by providing a Launch Intent Provider or specifying the action to be taken when a notification is tapped. For an example configuration, see the Simplified Customization section of this article.

You can also take complete control over push notifications, as described in the Full Control Customization section of this article.

To facilitate additional customization such as deep linking or handling custom keys, use the NotificationMessage class.

The NotificationCustomizationOptions class facilitates push notification customization through a NotificationChannelIdProvider, enabling the assignment of a specific Notification Channel for each NotificationMessage.

Additionally, NotificationLaunchIntentProvider defines the action to be taken when a NotificationMessage is tapped, alongside your application's Notification Icon.

When providing a builder to the NotificationCustomizationOptions class, you're responsible for managing all aspects of the notification’s display properties and tap actions, including Notification Channel creation, Launch Intent action, and so on.

You can access the NotificationCompat.Builder that would have been used by the SDK and use it as a baseline for modifications. Additionally, the SDK can create a default NotificationChannel for your application.

On devices running Android Oreo or above, the SDK creates a default notification channel called marketing to assign all notifications to it. To change the name of the default channel, set a string resource value for mcsdk_default_notification_channel_name.

After the SDK creates the NotificationChannel, the channel isn’t updated unless your application calls NotificationManager#createDefaultNotificationChannel(Context context, boolean forceRecreate).

You can create custom notification channels and assign channels to each notification, as depicted by the following example configuration.

To assign a notification to a channel, implement the SDK NotificationChannelIdProvider interface. Ensure that you include a channel with your message. Otherwise, the app doesn’t display the message to the recipient.

You can deliver location messages to a subset of your MobilePush audience by using the Android SDK. For example, when a mobile device breaches a geofence or enters the vicinity of a Bluetooth beacon, the SDK can prompt a callback to your mobile app for assessing whether to display a message.

Your app can apply criteria, including information within the MobilePush message itself, to determine whether to show a push notification, geofence message, or beacon message. Here are some use cases.

• Show the message if the user’s preferred store location is within the geofence region.
• Show the message if the user has items in the app shopping cart and if the message has an “abandonedCart”:”true” custom key.
• Show the message only when the store is open based on the app’s store location list and the region and local time.
• Don’t show messages if the user isn’t logged in to the app.
• Show specific messages based on the user’s customer profile. For example, customers who are coffee lovers get messages about coffee, but customers who prefer pastry receive a message to "buy coffee” when they’re in the shop.

Provide an implementation of ShouldShowNotificationListener to the NotificationManager. When you implement shouldShowNotification, you can access all information about the triggering message, including region data for geofence and beacon triggers.

In this example, to target only Gold loyalty-level customers for message delivery, the marketer sets the custom key loyaltyLevel to gold while creating the location message. Then, the message is shown only if the customer’s contact attribute is also set to gold.