Welcome to GetSocial product update for September and October. In short, we’ve enhanced our Push Notifications feature and added a flexible customization mechanism. Smart Invites and Activity Feed UI got fullscreen support, and Activity Feed posts can have clickable URLs from now on. Additionally, we’ve released our open-source GIF capturing library for Unity (published on Github).

Custom notifications with templates

With our new custom notifications feature, you can send user-to-user notifications from the client side via the new SDK sendNotification API. This helps improve your app’s re-engagement rates as users receive more meaningful and personal notifications from the app, their friends or other users they are associated with inside your app. With custom notifications, you can also embed custom payload (as key-value pairs) that can be passed from the sender to the receiver. If the recipient user does not have push notifications enabled you can still retrieve the notification and display it in your own in-app notification center.

Applicable use cases could include:

  • Users can ask their friends for extra lives. You no longer have to rely on Facebook’s game requests anymore, as you can achieve the same results right within your app.
  • When a user beats their friends’ high score, a notification could be sent to those friends, e.g.  “[Username] just beat your high score”
  • Users could send gifts to their friends. The recipient would receive a notification of the gift where gift metadata included in the notification payload
  • Users can ask their friends for help in a quest. Recipients join the quest right after the click on the push notification.
  • When a user publishes any content (e.g. a recipe) in your app, notify his friends\followers to view the content.

Dynamic content for all your push notifications

Push notifications can be further customized using templates. Templates contain pre-defined text with placeholders which you can edit via our dashboard. This enables you to use template name on the client side and change the notification content on our Dashboard.

Notification text supports emojis and can be translated to one of 24 supported languages. You can use custom placeholders which can be replaced from the app e.g. [Level] placeholder can be replaced with the level number.

Templates support requires SDK v6.22.0. Check the documentation to learn how to customize the content and add one of the predefined actions or a custom one on Android, iOS, and Unity.

Open source GIF capturing

We’ve published our own GIF capturing library for Unity projects to GitHub.

The project goal is to provide our customers with a generic and simple tool to enable recording of their user’s gameplay which can later be used with various GetSocial features:

  • GIF sharing with our Smart Invites: Capture your users’ gameplay and let them share it with friends across their preferred communication channels like WhatsApp, Messenger etc. Sharing gameplay is more captivating to the recipient and increases the conversion to installs.
  • GIF sharing with our Activity Feeds: In addition to the above, you can also let your users share their recording with their friends, their clan or the community on the Activity Feed. Increase social engagement as your users watch other users’ gameplay.
  • GIF sharing with iOS Push Notifications (coming soon): let your users share their gameplay with friends right from your game with our custom push notifications. This increases re-engagement and retention of your game as friends are pulled into the game with rich, meaningful and personal notifications.

Here’s an example of the recording we got for our internal testing app.

GetSocial GIF Capture Library for Unity https://github.com/getsocial-im/getsocial-capture 
And to top it off we completely open sourced the project. Check it out, record your gameplay and share awesome GIFs with everybody! 

CTA_Gif_Capture

Other notable updates

  • Fullscreen UI support: In SDK 6.22 we added fullscreen UI support for Activity Feed and Smart Invite views.
  • URL support in Activity feeds: We added URL support to activities and comments posted by company team members from the GetSocial dashboard.
  • Dashboard updates:
    1. Push Notification Settings and Smart Targeting pages are moved under the new ‘Notifications’ tab.
    2. GetSocial notification types were moved from the Push Notifications to Templates page.