Web notifications with Pusher Beams

Update: The Beams web notifications SDK was released on general availability on 22 July 2020.

We’re excited that we’ll soon be bringing web notification support in Beams into GA, following a successful open Beta programme. Our mission is to help developers create delightful connected experiences and web notifications are an important part of that picture.

We already provide multiple routes to get data to connected clients: whether that’s via a realtime WebSocket connection, or the various push gateways to mobile devices. Web notifications allow you to reach and re-engage customers who are active in your web and hybrid applications.

By building browser notifications into your website or web app, visitors can opt-in and stay updated without ever having to install your app, and without needing to be present on the website for delivery. This makes them an extremely effective mechanism for re-engagement and time-sensitive messaging. Some of the most popular use cases we’ve seen include utility messaging and service updates, recovering lost sessions, and re-activating users with personalised content.

We built web notifications with ease of use in mind. This is something we value highly at Pusher. You’ll be able to integrate in just a few steps:

1. Set up the SDK in your Beams dashboard
2. Create the service worker
3. Request permission and subscribe to device interests
4. Publish a notification

You’ll also find a Quickstart Guide in your Beams dashboard.

Beams is designed for transactional notifications: the important stuff that your users won’t want to miss. We provide a rich experience here — all the tools you need to direct valuable data to those who need it and the tools for you to understand what’s going on with Beams Insights.

Web notifications in Beams supports two different mechanisms for targeting end users with transactional notifications:

1. Device Interests for batch notification delivery of a single notification to be received by many end users who are subscribed
2. Authenticated Users: for more control over message delivery, targeting individual users with private notifications

The authenticated users mechanism is a great part of the Beams experience, and one of the things that makes it special. Now you have even more control of how you get that data to your end users.

The Beams web notifications SDK currently supports Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Opera. Due to some of the technical complexity of Apple’s implementation of web notifications in the browser, Safari is not yet available. If you’re interested in seeing Safari support included in future, let us know through the feedback channel below.

As always, this product was built for you. If there’s anything you think we could be doing to help accelerate your building process with Beams web notifications, get in touch to give feedback on the open beta, and you can be a part of the roadmap for our GA release. If you’re currently a Channels customer, why not use this opportunity to streamline your stack and add Beams!