In-App Notifications to Groups of Users

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Hi Team,

Week 3 on Glide and am loving it!

Apols in advance for the long post - hoping you get to the end.

I am sure this question has been asked a few times before - but need to get my head around my options.

I am developing an app for a Non-profit I belong to. Essentially a membership app - it contains details of members; meetings; venues; office holders etc. It is almost working exactly as I want it now (huge shout out to Kyle Heney my “Glide Expert”)

One of the big advantages of a smart phone app over a web page or SMS is the ability to receive in-app notifications. Without that core functionality apps like facebook, messenger and instagram would be dead ducks.

Members in my app attend meetings. Ocassionally the time of a meeting gets changed; or as we have seen with Covid - sometimes even cancelled.

I can’t find a way to have my app send a notification to a selected group of users advising them of a changed meeting time - or an alert that the meeting has been cancelled.

I could use the app to send them an email or an sms - but that kinda defeats the purpose of having the app in the first place.

In reading the various threads in this community it appears that notifications around chats will work on android - but that due to Apple-imposed rules - no notifications will work for iPhones.

Nothwithstanding these limitations this must be such a common problem for Glide developers that someone must have come up with a workaround. I’ve read posts about using VLOOKUPS in google sheets; posts about using tawk.to - but these all achieve the outcome through an email or SMS.

It seems a workable solution would be a broker app that works with both android and iphone which sits between the glide app and the notifications capability of the smartphone - but with the ability for the broker to ‘spoof’ the glide app. In other words - the glide app sends the hotification to the broker app; which pretends to be the glide app when it sends the notification to the user. The user receives what appears to be a Glide notification - but it is really coming from the broker app.

I can “live” with no in-app notifications - but it seems like such a lost opportunity for what, in every other respect, is the most amazing platform I have ever worked on.

PLEASE tell me there is a simple solution to my use cases and that I am missing someting super obvious.

Wishing you all a great 2023 from New Zealand.

Russ

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Hello Russ, I think everyone feels your pain and wishes there were an easy way to circumvent Apple blocking notifications to PWA’s. Some might have set up a broker app as you suggest. As far as I know however, most solutions have entailed using another communication channel and third party apps: email, SMS, WhatsApp.

Not the answer you were hoping for but hopefully someone will have a better answer.

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There are plenty of ways to do in-app notifications.

What you can’t do (yet) is push notifications. I realise that’s most likely what you meant, but pointing out the difference just in case.

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Email/SMS notifications are all I do… Push notifications would be great, but unfortunately, nothing like that is possible at the moment (though there may be a solution like the one you proposed @snooprussyruss … I’ve just never had to use it or look into it).

With the non-profit plan, you get access to the Send Email action which can work pretty well to send email notifications to users when a button is pressed. Plus, it’s all in Glide with no additional configuration needed!

Thanks for the shoutout Russ! Happy new year!

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Hi

Am still struggling to implement in app notification for Android.can you add me an example.

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Thanks Nathanael - it’s not enough to put me off Glide - just a lost opportunity.

Keep safe.
Russ

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Hi there - I haven’t actually done it either. There may be others on here that can help.

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Thanks Kyle.

I’ll check out the that Send Email Action as it might just be the ticket!

My biggest problem at this stage is that I just don’t know what I don’t know! :slight_smile:

Keep safe.

Russ

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@snooprussyruss Did you figure out in app notifications? I did some reading and it looks like the notifications feature by GlideApps is buggy. Are you still just doing email/SMS notifications? If so, would you mind sharing how you did it exactly? I am a total GlideApps rookie for context.

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Hi Angela,

You can ‘enable’ in app notifications from the settings button in your dashboard.

I have found the notifications work well on android - less reliably on apple - although as long as you have the right version of IoS - it seems to be stable.

A few gotchas though…

  1. You need to enable notifications on all devices you wish to receive notifications on

  2. It can be expensive. Once in production you use one credit per notification so you can quickly run out of credits if you have 5 or 6 thousand users.

I am sure that Glide is as keen as all of us to get this working better - but to some extent their hands are tied.

Hope this helps,

Russ

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Thanks so much Russ!