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Nicholas Lovell
Home   >   Self-Publishing   >   Marketing   >   Local notifications make a resurgence and 43% of users accept them

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Local notifications make a resurgence and 43% of users accept them

By on August 29, 2017

I often put local notifications low on my list of “features which must be included in an Minimum Viable Product”. They are easy to retrofit and don’t prove out the core of your game, so they don’t belong in an MVP. One data point I have is that for one company I’ve worked with, fewer than 2% of users allowed local notifications (admittedly for a branded app paid for by an advertiser.)

A recent report from comScore suggests I may be overly pessimistic. In their 2017 US Mobile App Report, comScore reports a significant rise int he number of US mobile users who will accept push notifications:

  • In 2017, 43% of app users say they often or always agree to an app’s request to allow push notifications.
  • Up 16 percentage points from the 27% of US users who said the same in 2016.

Other elements of the report are less positive: more than half of all time spent in digital media is spent in the user’s top 5 apps. (To be fair, that would include Hearthstone for me, so it’s not all bad for game makers.)

Thanks to Business Insider for bringing the report to my attention.

 

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com