Hi All, I am trying to find a solution for sending push notifications to select segments or groups of users of the same app. So for example lets say I am making an app for a pizza shops, I want the users to be able to say select they like "vegetarian" pizzas, then when the shop has a special on vegetarian pizzas or launches a new Veg pizza they are able to send a push notification to only those that have selected the Veg option segment and it is not sent to others that have not selected vegetarian because they are not interested in news about it etc I think you get the picture. I currently use Urban Airship, but there help resources are lacking, has anyone had any experience doing this or can point me in the right direction? Thanks

Parse. They have a feature called Channels and you can send PN to subscribers of that channel. Appoxee has something similar too. I'm in the home stretch of testing the Parse implementation in an app right now. A ton of custom coding and lots of logic to process to get it to work just right. But I've got it working on both platforms finally.. Parse has a great back-end to send the PN to the segments. check their site and this blog post discusses it http://blog.parse.com/2011/07/18/targeted-push-notifications/ market plugin? This would be tough. So many variables and customization to add this to an app so it works properly. At current market prices I'd be giving away months of work, so this is more of a per-project type thing we're offering to clients.

@ATRAIN -- are the PNs sent by BuzzTouch done by specifying the devices or is it done by the App ID At Apple's end? If it is done by BuzzTouch, then we could implement "channels" within the BuzzTouch control panel. I'm stating it quite simplistically. Would that be the starting point of the journey? What you think? -- Niraj

@niraj I Have not played with the BT PN stuff. Actually have had to strip that code out of my app delegate to make Parse PN happy. I'm still curious if there are any BT users with BT PN and a 3rd party service like Parse working together in a production environment? but the channel is just stored as a value in an array in parse, same table as the device id, etc... David could probably add that pretty easily to the backend if he wants. Great future upgrade for sure. Segmented Push is a good value add. The real work is in managing those channels. Creating the user flow, logins, errors, how many channels, saving values, etc...that stuff all changes per app. Any canned solution will likely need some additional customization.

Interesting ATrain, please let us know when you have it working and what is involved.

Just doing the final testing this week and hope to have it in a production app shortly. After all the coding now, it's just lots of customization to make it work and look right in a particular app. More or less a service we'll be offering to clients.

Very interested to see it working.

subscribed!

Testing has gone well so far, no issues. Hoping to have the app approved soon and anxious to see how the client uses it. I think they have some other features they want me to add before they submit a binary. @kaybee I just sent you a PM-

Is your code shareable?

It's a custom solution that requires customization to add it to a BT project. Or any iOS project to be honest. But it can be added to any project that uses the Parse platform for a fee. If you're interested in what the fee is, send me a PM.