Push Notification
A push notification is a message delivered to a device from your servers, appearing whether or not the app is open. On iOS it requires explicit permission; on Android it is granted by default on older versions and prompted on newer ones.
Permission is spent once. Prompting on first launch, before the user understands what the app does, produces the lowest opt-in rates and cannot be undone — a denied prompt is not easily re-asked. Prompting after a moment where notifications are obviously useful produces substantially better rates.
After opt-in, the constraint is relevance. Notifications that aren't useful get switched off or get the app deleted, and both are permanent.
Why it matters
It's the only channel that reaches a customer without them opening anything, which makes it valuable and easy to destroy.
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