A quick glance of what’s happening in the notifications space
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Apple released iOS 18.3 but the notification summaries have been disabled for now due to incorrect summarization. Good for everyone as we still have time to improve notification experience for users. A lot of our customers are introducing In-app notifications in their product to offload some of the messaging from these out of app channels. Check it out.
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Resend is revamping email space again with new.email with cross-platform, consistent email designs. Plus, they are combining it with LLM to build beautiful emails in minutes. Would it be something that you’ll be interested in. We are planning to add react.email support. Will keep following the news on the new.email service.
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Android 15 allows notifications to be dismissed on one device to be automatically dismissed on others, enhancing user experience across the Android ecosystem. We want to take it a step ahead and provide the support for cross-channel dismissal. For example, when someone approves on email, the notification state in Inbox also changes to approved or the option to archive notifications across channels when user dismisses it on 1 channel.
Product Updates
Inbox 2.0: Enhanced security, seen tracking and In-app feed component
We have made a significant update in our Inbox SDK. Here’s what’s new:
- Enhanced Security: We've replaced HMAC authentication with stateless JWT authentication for better security, scalability, and flexibility.
- Notification feed component: Directly export and embed the In-app Feed component to design any Inapp experience in a breeze. You can also add the same Inapp feed in headless JS implementation for quicker integration.
- Seen tracking with interaction observer: Now, notifications will be automatically marked as "seen" when they come in user's scroll view.
If you are on old SDK version, we highly recommend migrating to the latest version. We are planning to introduce some interesting updates in our In-app experience.
Workflow Node level Analytics
Now get a consolidated view of users flowing in your workflow, at what step did they drop off, is any of the workflow node failing, what are those failure reasons. In case of conditional branches, which branch are most users going through. We’ll further be introducing detailed analytics on each step to see engagement rates, failure reasons, daily, hourly trends etc.
Broadcast Executions Step by Step log
We’ve done a major revamp to our Broadcast logging and monitoring, designed to give you greater control and transparency over your broadcast executions.
Here’s what’s new:
- Real-time Execution Tracking: Monitor broadcast operations as they happen, ensuring you stay informed every step of the way.
- Step-by-Step Debugging: View detailed execution logs for each step of your broadcast, helping you pinpoint errors and resolve issues faster.
- Advanced Filters: Quickly locate specific broadcasts with filters for tenant, list ID, broadcast slug, idempotency key, and status. Easily identify and analyze failure logs.
- Detailed Broadcast Summaries: Access a comprehensive summary of each broadcast run directly from the listing page, similar to workflow execution logs.
New APIs for asset deletion and better user management
List entry/exit events in trigger
You can now trigger a workflow when a user enters or leaves a list. Use this in the Wait Until node to stop reminders or dynamically route users in a workflow on list updates.This will help you build workflows on user lists like, send series of activation notifications to users who didn't interact with the product in last 30 days and stop sending when they become active again.
Batch - Flush First Item Immediately
We've introduced a new setting in batch processing: Flush First Item in Batch. This setting allows the first trigger to flow past the batch immediately while subsequent triggers are batched within the specified time window. You can use this to build leading debounce logic in workflow, where users are notified about critical updates like anomaly alerts immediately, while batching rest of the alerts and sending them at regular intervals until the issue is resolved.
Nested Objects - Choose the fan out depth
Now, you have full control over how deep the fan-out should go (instead of the default fan out of upto 2 levels). You can now set the depth in the recipient payload, defining how far the workflow should propagate to fetch subscriptions. You can use this to build Escalation Workflows or Tiered Customer Support Notifications, send notification to a shared slack channel or customer support queue first and then escalate to individual users in case of no response in a given time duration.
Workflow - Relative Delay and Batch window
Added the ability to set relative delays and batch windows in workflows. Now, you can define delays relative to a future timestamp, often provided by your trigger payload.
Other Updates 📣
- New handlebars helpers introduced to handle JSON strings - jsonParse and jsonPath
- Fixed empty scrollbar CSS in Inbox when the macOS setting Show Scroll bars: Always is enabled. Now, the scrollbar always show only on hover.
- Adjusted the Inbox notification action menu to open at the top of the last notification, preventing it from being trimmed when it opened at the bottom.
- Changed the Inbox mobile view action menu to always display, rather than showing it on as in the web version.
- [SDK] We have exposed object management methods in Node SDK
- [SDK] Object methods and User APIs to fetch user and their subscription exposed in Java SDK
What's Next?
Template Variants and APIs
We are introducing template variants to support multi-tenant usecases and A/B testing the template content. Along with this, the whole templating experience will be simplified with side by side preview for all channels, template mock fully connected with workflow, lot more sample template to import from and better template suggestion. We’ll also be exposing it over APIs so that you can use this to solve tenant template usecases, like giving our customers access to edit templates within your product or tenants sending custom whatsapp messages to their users using their own vendor.
Headless Analytics
We are completely revamping entire platform analytics to show detailed analytics at subscriber, vendor, channel and workflow level. You can analyse some interesting metrics like notification cost analysis or tracking vendor latency. We’ll giving the same over API as headless BI engine where you can pass SQL query and use it get data over API. You can then use it to show analytics to your customers within your product. We’ll also extend it as Postgres connection, which you can easily connect to the visualization tool or querying engine of your choice for internal dashboards and reporting.
For the next set of features, you can refer to our roadmap and for new updates, checkout our changelog and stay tuned to our Slack community.
