Notes and limitations about push notifications

Push notifications are supported equally in both the iOS and Android Driftscape apps, and the webapp. The same menu items and functionality exists, including background notifications, foreground in-app notifications, SMS text, and emails.

The name of a channel is displayed as “[Organization name] - [Channel name]” in the notification email, SMS texts, and foreground in-app notification. Otherwise, Channels currently have no other differences in behavior.

To respect our User Privacy Policy, we do not share their personal information with organizations. This protects your organization as well, since disclosure of such information is likely to create additional issues for municipalities that must adhere to stringent data protection requirements.

All personal user information collected by Driftscape is stored in a secure third-party authentication platform (FusionAuth), which is built for maximum security and follows stringent data protection standards and audits.

Currently, users can only choose to subscribe or unsubscribe to all of the channels from an organization (i.e. they cannot choose to subscribe to only some of the channels). This will be coming in the future.

Currently, there are no analytics or performance reports available for push notifications. This will be coming in the future.

Our delivery of in-app notifications to mobile devices is completed using a sophisticated technology called Firebase Cloud Messaging, which itself is built on native push messaging libraries for Android and iOS. While the in-app notifications are usually received within a minute, there can be delays, and occasionally even errors, given the complexity of the FCM system.

Push notifications are only supported on your main parent organization. All the same, all of the content from sub-layers (including ABLs) will include the subscribe/unsubscribe buttons, and explicitly work on the parent organization in effect.