2016 was a monumental year for OneSignal as we saw ourselves grow from 11,000 registered developers to over 110,000.

We are excited to announce several powerful new features to make sending notifications through OneSignal even better as we enter the new year.

Smart-Scheduling

Our new smart scheduling feature combines data from 2 Billion devices across 125,000 apps to predict the ideal notification delivery time for each user. We analyze each time users interact with notifications from your application or website. These events are used to build a predictive model of when to deliver future notifications to that user.

Early testing demonstrates a 15% increase in the clickthrough rate (CTR) of marketing notifications that use this new scheduling capability and this will only improve as OneSignal is adopted by more developers over time.

Tag Substitution

Notifications can now be personalized for each user based on tags you have set for them. For example, this can be used to include the user's name, location, or recently viewed items.

If a user has the tag {name: "George"}, you can now insert this tag into your notification like so:

Hello {{ name | default: "there"}}!

And then this user will receive the notification "Hello George!".

Tag substitution can also used in the Title or Launch URL fields.

Additional guides and examples on this powerful new feature can be found in our documentation.

Segmentation Improvements

Segments can now contain both AND and OR conditions, making it even easier to precisely target users.

Web Push Updates

OneSignal now supports 1-click Opt-In for HTTP sites!

To use this feature on a Wordpress site, update to the latest version of our Wordpress plugin and then enable automatic prompting.

Our guide on how to enable this feature covers non-wordpress sites. New HTTP sites that follow our setup guide will have this feature enabled by default.

Mobile App SDK Updates

Android

  • Android badges are now supported on older Samsung devices, OPPO, and ZUK devices.

  • Google project numbers are now managed from the OneSignal dashboard and no longer need to be configured in your app. OneSignal will also reject attempts to use a server key that is not for the specified project number.

  • Notification background images are now top-left aligned by default.

iOS

  • Several important bug fixes have been released in the last 3 months and we recommend all developers update to the latest version of our iOS SDK.

  • We’ve added additional informational messages to our SDK and dashboard to help troubleshoot issues such as missing push entitlements.

Other news

  • We recently published a detailed technical blog post on OnePush, our internal system for sending notifications. Check it out.

  • Did you know you could link sending Web or Mobile notifications from an RSS feed, Twitter feed, e-mail, content management system, and more? Check our documentation on how to do this with Zapier.

  • OneSignal is hiring developers in Mountain View, CA. Check out our open positions here.

We hope you enjoy all of the new additions to OneSignal! Many more exciting features will be announced in the coming months and we can't wait to reveal them to you.

Thanks for helping to make OneSignal the go-to place for all of your Push Notification needs!

~The OneSignal Team