What are Notification Channels?
Coming with Android Oreo, Notification Channels provide you with the ability to group the notifications that your application sends into manageable groups. Once your notifications are in these channels, you no longer have input into their functionality — so it is up to the user to manage these channels.
See the following links for more detailed intro:
Notification Channel Priorities
Low:
- When collapsed, only the title is shown in one line with the application name and creation date of the notification.
- Small image previews are not available in collapsed mode.
- When expanded, the notification looks like a regular expanded notification.
- Does not play notification sound.
- The notification's icon is not displayed in the status bar.
Medium:
- Expanded and collapsed notifications look as usual.
- Does not play notification sound.
High:
- Plays notification sound.
Urgent:
- Displays a heads-up notification.
On Oreo, heads-up notifications are not set on a per notification basis, rather on a per channel basis. This means that if you post into a channel that has Urgent importance, then that notification will display as a heads-up notification on Oreo devices. Keep in mind that the user can lower the importance of channels, so it is not guaranteed that your channel will remain in the Urgent category.
Setting up Notification Channels
Please follow the guide here if you want to use full potential of Android Oreo’s Notification Channels.
- Create a Notification Channel(s) within your app.
- Assign a Channel ID and Channel Name to your channels.
- In your Emarsys account, go to Campaigns > Mobile Engage > Apps and select the application you want to edit.
- On General Settings, under Platforms, click the edit icon to edit the Android Platform.
Setting up Notification Channels – Channel ID and Channel Name
Set up the channel ID and channel name of your application.
Note: The channels specified here need to be present in the application already.
If you are using the Mobile Engage SDK default channel, the channel ID will be always ems_me_default.
If channels are not set, the app will not crash, but your push message will not be delivered and you will find an error in your application logs similar to this one:
No Channel found for pkg=com.emarsys.mobileengage.sample, channelId=null...
Using Mobile SDK Default Channel
If you don’t want to manage your own channels, you can use the ”default” channel managed by Mobile Engage SDK. In order to do that, please declare this in MobileEngageConfig (choose a channel name and channel description):
MobileEngageConfig config = new MobileEngageConfig.Builder()
.......
.enableDefaultChannel("default", "here is a description")
.......
.build();
In case you don’t want to use the Mobile Engage SDK default channel, please use a declaration like this:
MobileEngageConfig config = new MobileEngageConfig.Builder() ....... .disableDefaultChannel() ....... .build();
Sending out a push message through Notification Channels
Once your channels are set up, you can select them in the push message interface on Content Creation tab under Android while creating your push message, selectable by Channel name:
