Beams overview
Beams is an API for sending push notifications to iOS, Android and Web applications. It includes a hosted service and specialized SDKs to seamlessly manage your app’s device push tokens. To send notifications, you can either authenticate devices as Authenticated Users for private notifications to specific users across their devices or you can subscribe devices to public Device Interests for batch notification delivery. Get a realtime Debug Console and observe Insights to keep track of your notification service health.
∞ Example Use Cases
Our API and SDKs make Beams the developer-friendly tool to send push notifications. Developers use Beams to orchestrate a personalized notification experience for app users.
With Beams, you can programmatically trigger push notifications based on actual in-app activity to keep users engaged with your app, such as:
- Progress through a food delivery, ride-sharing, or any other logistics/delivery app
- Scores in a game or news alerts sent in realtime from a server to interested clients
- Social engagement like comments, likes, or interactions inside of an app
- Transactional notifications for e-commerce, fintech, or any other marketplace app
∞ Main Features
With the Beams API and SDKs, developers can build a personalized notification service using:
- Authenticated Users allows you to securely associate devices with your own user ID which you set from your server and publish personalized notifications directly to users.
- Device Interests target groups of devices. They use the Publish/Subscribe model to decide which devices should receive a particular message.
- Hosted Token Management keeps push tokens up to date with the platform push gateway for valid publishing.
- Webhooks for each notification sent to a user for key events like publishes, acks, and opens to integrate with other events in your server.
- Insights about key notification service health metrics such as acknowledgement and open rates reported back from the devices.
- Debug Console for realtime observability into a notification service broken down by events from a new device registration all the way to notification opened by the user.
∞ Getting Started
There are two ways to get started with Pusher Beams:
∞ Interactive quick start guide in Dashboard
Head over to the Pusher dashboard and create a new instance of Pusher Beams. After that, you will be taken to our interactive quick start guide.
∞ Documentation
Or if you would prefer, you can skip the interactive quick start and follow the steps here in the documentation: