RNR 136: Push Notifications with Narendra Shetty

React Native Radio - Un pódcast de Jamon Holmgren, Robin Heinze, Adhithi Ravichandran, Harris Robin Kalash

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In this week’s episode of React Native Radio, the panel interviews Narendra Shetty, who gave a recent talk on push notifications. Narendra introduces push notifications, explaining that every app needs something to notify customers. Push notifications have become a main feature in both mobile and web applications and there are a few things every developer needs to understand when using them.

Narendra explains the topics he discussed in his talk. The first being how important push notifications are and the importance of understanding when to ask permission to send notifications. Next, he discussed registering new users for notifications and how this differs for Apple and Android. Finally, he talked about the importance of knowing your customers and what types of notifications they would want.

Charles Max Wood wonders if the push notifications are less understood because of the React Native perspective. Narendra explains how it depends on where the developer is coming from, the back end developers may not understand push notifications as well as front end developers. It also gets more complicated depending on the device, the server and the location of the user.

Josh Justices asks the rest of the panel about how they feel about web applications sending push notifications and wonders if anyone would actually want them from a web app. Charles speaks up and shares his experience both as a developer, since Devchat.TV started sending notifications, and as a consumer on other sites. Narendra considers the success of Charles's experience and explains that with more data push notifications can be optimized.

The panel considers why push notifications are more often excepted on the mobile app than on the web app. Narendra explains the need to do push notifications correctly, so as not to irritate the customers. When developers don’t think about the needs of the customers, the customer can be clogged with requests and notifications. Narendra warns developers not to be irritating or the customer will most likely just shut off the notifications.

The panel moves on to another talk given by Narendra about AB testing. Narendra explains what AB testing is and how he learned about it. AB testing is where users are presented with two options A or B and they have to choose the one they like the most. Narendra shares the importance of dividing your user base, explaining why this is the hardest and most important part of the experiment.

The benefits of AB testing are considered. Josh asks Narendra what size of company is this testing practice most effective. Narendra explains that since the testing group needs to be large it works better for a large company but smaller companies can still do it. Narendra shares some examples of ab testing and recommendations for learning about ab testing.

The process is discussed. Narendra stresses the importance of having a hypothesis and primary metric when doing an AB test. He explains it is also a good idea to have secondary metrics to track in the experiment. AB testing gives you data to make decisions and not just go with what your boss thinks is the best thing.

The panel discusses the value of data and statistics in decision making and in understanding what the customer wants. Narendra explains how having a product and customer-focused mindset while coding can help you solve the problem that the product is meant to fix. This leads the panel to discuss how to find your passion in programming. The panel advises listeners about finding their passion.