As the end of September approaches, we come here to announce some new features, improvements and bug fixes. We introduced a new type of region named “Contextual Location” that, for now, includes “Home” and “Work” locations. This novel type of region allows targeting a users residence or working place, without the need to specify such places. Additionally, we now also offer a way of defining and building target audiences, this feature is likewise available on the dashboard. With the advent of iOS 12, our iOS SDK was updated in order to support Provisional Permissions (also known as “Deliver Quietly Notifications”). The Android SDK was also the center of attention with some performance improvements made to the latest version (3.1-beta) of this plugin. Lastly, a bug regarding slowness while loading notification campaigns on the dashboard was taken care of and some improvements were made to the documentation.
Contextual Location
The relevance of a notification is determined, among other factors, by context and timing. With this in mind, we introduced a new feature that allows choosing “Home” or “Work” of a user as the chosen location for a campaign. This allows you to send cations at the places that generally a user spends most of its time and increase the chance of getting a users attention. Figuring out where a user lives or works manually, would be a cumbersome job. That’s why we determine these locations for you, so that you can set up these campaigns in an easy and quick way. To create a campaign that uses one of these special locations, simply go to the dashboard, create a new campaign as you normally would and in the section “Select the locations for this Campaign”, select the “Context” tab. Note that this feature is only available for Android and starting from version 3.X of the SDK.
Audiences
Understanding and defining who your clients are, is essential to deploy an effective marketing strategy. Our new feature, Audiences, comes as an aid for this matter. This feature allows you to build a group of users based on a set of parameters that characterize their location patterns. For example, determining the “avid movie goers” of your client base is as simple as defining an audience of users that attend the movie theatres at least once per week on our dashboard.
iOS 12 support
iOS 12 is here and so is the Plot Projects iOS SDK for it. As of Plot Projects iOS SDK 2.3.0-beta, we now support iOS 12 features such as Provisional Permissions and group Notifications (more information in our documentation).
Android SDK beta release
Our Android SDK also keeps evolving, with some performance fixes included in the new version 3.1.0-beta2.
Dashboard improvements
The dashboard was occasionally suffering from a bit of slowness when listing notification campaigns, which was influencing the user experience and therefore this bug was fixed.