Notification channels

How to create and use Notification Channels with Pushwoosh

Starting with Pushwoosh SDK version 5.4.0, you can use the Notification Channels functionality on Android Oreo (API 26) and higher. In few words, it's a way to group your notifications based on your app's inner logic and set a particular behavior to each group, such as a custom sound, vibration, and LED.

Creating a Notification Channel

Our SDK handles notification channels out-of-the-box and creates them directly on users' devices. To create a notification channel using Pushwoosh, here's what you need to do:

1. Set up the channel's configuration. Specify the parameters such as sound, vibration, LED, or priority, and our SDK will set this configuration as channel's default. Note that your users might change this configuration on their mobile phones.

To learn the details of managing notification channels, please see Android Developer guide.

2. Specify the channel's name. Add the following key-value pair to Android root params in your Control Panel:

Android root params

{"pw_channel": "PUSH NOTIFICATION CHANNEL NAME"}

The first push received with a new channel's name will create a channel with this name on users' devices.

It is not possible to change the channel’s parameters after it’s been created on the device! To keep the same default channel parameters on all your users' devices, you should use the same configuration whenever you send a push to a particular channel. Otherwise, your new users might have different default settings on their devices.

To send a message to an existing channel, you need to pass the same key-value pair in Android root params, using the name of the existing channel.