

Show HN: Insights into billions of daily smartphone notifications - alexeichemenda
https://batch.com/insights/hn

======
SimonDawlat
Hello HN. Founder here. Happy to answer any questions.

In a nutshell: I was inspired to build this service after the AppGratis/Apple
disagreement back in 2013 where most of the controversy revolved around our
supposed "abuse of push notifications" (Guideline 5.6, in Apple's book).

What happened next made me realize how important notifications were going to
be: it's the next interface for users, while developers rely on them entirely
for growth and engagement. But until today there was no analytics service
dedicated to this new medium, which is what we're trying to build with Batch
Insights.

Hope you'll like it.

~~~
y0ghur7_xxx
> made me realize how important notifications were going to be: it's the next
> interface for users

Hi Simon. Why do you think that pn will be so important? I have Cyanogenmod
without google apps, and I don't miss pn one bit. I understand that I am not
the typical user, but what do you see in pn that I don't?

~~~
SimonDawlat
First off, for studying apps behaviors over the past months we've observed
some pretty interesting content strategies: marketers and content producers
are hard at work on making notifications are more polished experience. Then,
platforms are pushing notifications forward, they know it creates addictions
for both developers and users so they're likely to invest more there in the
future. It's becoming the interface for users. For developers, it's growth +
engagement. Eventually, notifications formats themselves are evolving: richer,
with images, with more characters, with more elaborate call to actions, etc.
I'll think we'll see some interesting innovations in this space in the next
18/24 months.

I'm still totally with you on Cyanogenmod with no pn. As someone wrote earlier
today on the Internet: 'I miss the good old days of being AFK'.

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simonw
I don't understand what this does or how it works.

"Using a new proprietary indexing technology, Batch is on a mission to track
all the push notifications in the world and make them available in a
centralized and unified place."

Can you track push notifications that are being sent by other applications? If
so, how do you do that? Are you running a bunch of Android and iOS devices,
installing apps, subscribing to push notifications in them and then gathering
data that way? Or do you have a library that developers have to include in
their applications?

~~~
SimonDawlat
Answer below on what is does. We address some specific demographics so it's
not necessarily something useful for you if you're not in mobile
dev/product/marketing.

"Are you running a bunch of Android and iOS devices, installing apps,
subscribing to push notifications in them and then gathering data that way?"

That's the basic idea except that we use virtual machines mostly, combined
with some hardware components.

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yargevad
Assuming your approach to gathering data is similar to the other guesses in
this thread, your stats will be skewed for "pushers" who actually target their
notifications, as opposed to sending a homogenous marketing blast. People who
target their notifications (to a geoloc, or topic of interest for example) are
going to be incorrectly represented here.

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matthieurouif
I helped writing a post on business insider about push notifications
acceptance rate [http://www.businessinsider.com.au/push-notifications-
study-2...](http://www.businessinsider.com.au/push-notifications-
study-2013-10) . I hope these guys will be able to confirm this 40% acceptance
rate

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NicoPrincen
This is great - we are building our notification strategy right now. What
would your top benchmarks be? Like the three most polished experiences and
strategies with notifications? (We're in digital content distribution fyi).
Thanks!

~~~
SimonDawlat
What's your category exactly? Happy to look into it for you.

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francis88
Looks interesting! I'd love to hear more about your ideal use case. Who can
benefit from it? I browsed through the site and was left unsure of who exactly
is going to use it. Any hints?

~~~
SimonDawlat
Good question!

There is a lot of work to be done to improve the quality, uniqueness, and
usefulness of mobile notifications. Before Batch Insights, there was no way to
get a comprehensive view of the notifications sent by gaming/m-commerce co's
or news outlets. Now, as a marketer, product manager, or developer you can use
Batch Insights to become inspired and develop a more effective and
differentiated strategy.

There are a lot of unanswered questions about the industry's use of mobile
notifications, such as:

1\. In the media industry, were you first to broadcast the news on Ferguson.
See >
[https://batch.com/insights/all?language=en&search=ferguson%2...](https://batch.com/insights/all?language=en&search=ferguson%20%22grand%20jury%22)

2\. How is your competition using notifications? Track a specific vertical
such as games and monitor them in real-time or follow custom groupings of the
apps that matter to you. See >
[https://batch.com/insights/all?category=games&language=en](https://batch.com/insights/all?category=games&language=en)

3\. In gaming, some use incentivized notifications to reengage, others try to
make you feel sorry. What's your strategy?

4\. How unique is your message from day to day? Which days are most popular
for certain messages? You can view statistics on the content of your
notifications, as well as others'. See >
[https://batch.com/insights/app/ios/inside-com-breaking-
news](https://batch.com/insights/app/ios/inside-com-breaking-news)

Being mobile developers ourselves we've been dying to know. Batch Insights
tries to answer these questions.

------
spolu
The story behind this project is awesome. Built by the team behind AppGratis
which got huge and was then shut down by Apple. They're now back full steam
with this project.

~~~
grimtrigger
Just read the backstory. What a bunch of crap on apples part.

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julien_c
Great vision and execution. I would love for their search field to be instant
(ie. no return keypress required), would improve discoverability/serendipity.

~~~
SimonDawlat
That we can certainly add very quickly – thx for the great suggestion.

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alexeichemenda
Hey, I've used the tool a bit and love how easy it is to pull data from a
specific app to identify push notifications patterns.

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jackhulsom
Is there any way for me to look for "All push notifications sent in the past
month by App X on Android" for example ?

~~~
SimonDawlat
Easy, just go to an app page. Say, Inside for example:

iOS – [https://batch.com/insights/app/ios/inside-com-breaking-
news](https://batch.com/insights/app/ios/inside-com-breaking-news)

Android – [https://batch.com/insights/app/android/inside-
com](https://batch.com/insights/app/android/inside-com)

~~~
alexeichemenda
And you'll have a lot of statistics there, such as the average number of words
/ characters used in all of their push notifications, frequency etc. That's
really useful to get an overview.

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matthieurouif
Looks interesting. I would be curious to know how you guys track
notifications? Did you have to jail break the iPhone?

~~~
brador
I'm guessing a rooted phone, loaded with all the apps they can get that have
notifications, and a custom scraper.

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dwild
Where do you get this information from?

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grimtrigger
Very cool. Do you have any information about pushes other than the content of
the push itself?

~~~
SimonDawlat
We're working on getting destination link/deeplink + open rate + conversion
rate next. But before that we have a lot of advanced analytics features to
build on top of the content itself. Product roadmap is quite packed!

------
hiroprot
Are you using ANCS to capture the notifications?

~~~
SimonDawlat
Nop :)

------
dang
"Show HN" requires that there be something users can try out and use now. The
website makes it seem like this hasn't launched yet, so we took Show HN out of
the title. If that's wrong, we'll put it back.

~~~
SimonDawlat
I believe that's a mistake: we link to a special page
([https://batch.com/insights/hn](https://batch.com/insights/hn)) made
specifically for HN readers that lets anyone sign-up instantly and access 100%
of the features we've built as of today.

EDIT: looks like it's our special page wording that caused the confusion –
we're updating it right now.

~~~
dang
Ok, we'll put "Show HN" back.

~~~
SimonDawlat
Much appreciated. We've also made our top banner wording more explicit. Thx.

