Push notifications have carved their own niche as a powerful tool for continuous user engagement. Regardless of whether an app is actively in use, they deliver your messages straight to your user's device. Two useful tools to enhance your push notification strategy are Segment and Courier. In this article, we show you how to set up Courier to listen to your Segment events and then send push notifications to an Android device based on data from these events.

Once upon a time, SMS was the crowning achievement of communications technology. It combined email’s asynchronous archive of messages with a portable device, allowing anyone to send and receive information anywhere they were. Today, widespread mobile internet access has somewhat eclipsed the main functionality of SMS, but it remains a dominant form for communication in many markets and in particular business cases.

Perhaps because we are constantly swamped with push notifications, they can go overlooked as a messaging category. They are nevertheless an important medium of modern communication, and a more diverse one than you might think. Push notifications initialize interactions between a recipient and a sender, in an era of communication where response times are measured in seconds. Such high-frequency information requires effective distillation to remain efficient and to avoid flooding recipients with noise.

Firebase offers useful SDKs for both iOS and Android apps. It provides database services, analytics, and push notification tools. It also works with most programming languages, including Swift. If you're reading this article, you've probably already come across Firebase and its Cloud Messaging tool, which can be used to send push notifications to both Android and iOS devices.