[RELEASED] GameThrive - Free Mobile Push Notification Service

Greetings fellow Unity devs!

My team was working on adding social features to some of our mobile apps recently, and we were really unhappy with a lot of existing 3rd party mobile push notification tools. They were all either 1. Too expensive, 2. Lacked good Unity plugins, or 3. Missing some key features.

So we built our own system to use in-house, and now we're excited to open it up to the world as well. Since we make most of our revenue from our games studio, we can afford to keep the price of this service aggressively low and continually improve it with features that we need for our own games.

Come check it out: https://gamethrive.com

Key features:

1. Simple and polished Unity integration
2. Supports sending messages to iOS, Android (Google Play), Kindle Fire (ADM), Windows Mobile (WP8), and Chrome Apps & Extensions.
3. Free up to 1 Million devices and 1 Million monthly messages.
4. Easy to use localization and segment targeting tools
5. Designed specifically with games and game developers in mind, it even has "game" in the name
6. NEW - Automatically delivery notifications to players at key moments, such as when they've been inactive for a couple of days.
7. NEW - Schedule notifications to be sent at the ideal time of day to each users based on when they've previously played your game.
8. NEW - Realtime statistics on notifications that you've sent.
9. Many, many more features

Website: https://gamethrive.com
Documentation: http://documentation.gamethrive.com/

Screenshots:

 

We welcome newcomers!

But what about our plugin? It's on the market for quite a while, it was the first full-featured plugin for Unity. We have a strong user base with Unity, and provide a great value that only comes with experience.

Not to say that we were the first push notifications service that actually made push notifications free and unlimited

 

New Updates!

1. Released an API to deliver notifications device-to-device or from a server.
2. Added a feature to deliver notifications at a user's last-active time. Our system will automatically deliver notifications at the same time of day as a person last played your game.
3. Released a free Apple / APNS Push Notification Certificate creation tool Works with other Push Notification services as well!
4. Updated API documentation

 

So many new features!!

1. Automatic Notifications - Deliver localized messages to users immediately once certain criteria are met. For example, this can be used to automatically send a message to inactive users or to congratulate players on beating your game.



2. Real Time Analytics - View the status and conversion of your notifications in true real-time. No browser refresh required.



3. Templates - Save a copy of a notification that you can deliver automatically or manually as often as you want. Edit the template any time and future notifications will automatically be updated.

4. Improved API - Even more powerful and easy to use than before. Deliver notifications to users by segment, id, or token. Localize your message in as many languages as you wish. Delay notifications from going out until the exact moment of day that each user is likely to read them.

5. Many many more improvements

Many of these improvements were implemented for a big upcoming game that we are releasing, but we're thrilled to share them with the rest of the Unity community as well. Thank you for your support!

 

New updates released today!

You can now exclude users who use your other apps from receiving duplicate notifications.

 

It looks good but if there's no option for self hosted, then I can't consider it.

 

We have a few new features to announce! These mainly apply to people who have many apps that they need to send notifications to.

1. Create and manage GameThrive apps using our API. Useful for people who have more than a few apps or prefer to do things programmatically rather than having to click around in our dashboard.

2. Compose and deliver a notification to multiple apps with our API. We also take care of making sure that players don't receive a duplicate notification if they have more than one of the apps installed (A free and a pro version, for example).

Many more new features coming soon!

 

It's been a while and we've released a bunch of new features in the last few weeks!

We're now working with over 500 developers including some of the largest Unity3D development studios.

Here are some of our new features:

1. We now support iOS 8, and iOS 8 notification action buttons. Android action button support is coming very soon!


2. We now support sending Push Notifications to Windows Phone devices.

3. We've partnered with Prime31 to be integrated into their extremely popular iOS Etcetera Plugin! We still strongly recommend using our own Unity SDK, but if you hate dealing with additional plugins now you may not need to.

4. You can now send a notification by device timezone. That way it will be received by each device at the same time of day (for example, 1PM no matter what timezone each device is in).


5. Our system now delivers large batches of notifications much faster. It was fast before, but now it's super fast!

6. We have a brand new website

 

Another set of updates, plus a special announcement:

Last week three of our Unity clients had apps featured worldwide on the front page of the app store at the same time!

And now on to what's new:

1. Brand new beautiful Setup and API documentation.

Check it out: http://documentation.gamethrive.com/

2. Automatic Purchase Tracking.

Our SDKs (including our Unity SDK) now automatically track what items your players have bought, making it easier than ever to deliver targeted notifications. For example, you can send a notification to paying players thanking them or encouraging them to buy more iAP.



3. Improved delivery scheduling

We're improved our delivery scheduling system to make it easier to schedule notifications in the future, or to have them delivered at the ideal time for each player.



4. API Notification Targeting by Tags

You can now deliver notifications through our API based on tags that players have, without needing to define a segment. Learn more in our new API documentation: http://documentation.gamethrive.com/v1.0/docs/notifications-create-notification

 

We have a couple new features to announce. We're also nearing an amazing milestone -- 1000 developers using GameThrive!

1. You can now use custom message titles for Android devices. Titles can also be localized.


2. Delivery speed has been significantly boosted to better handle apps with millions of users.

 

We use GameThrive plugin for unity3d and we have a problem.
We pass a delegate function in GameThrive.Init but it is not called at all.
After some debugging, we found that GameThrive.onPushNotificationReceived function is not called.
Notifications normally appear on our android device.
Where is the problem?

 

After you open the notification on the Android device does it take you back to your Unity game? Check your AndroidManifest.xml and make sure you have the following in your <application> tag?

Code (XML):

1. <activity android:name="com.gamethrive.NotificationOpenedActivity"/>

If that is correct I would look at the logcat from your device to see if there are any errors or warnings when you open a notification.

Thanks.

 

GameThrive just got featured on TechCrunch!

We've also introduced a few new features:

1. If you're an Urban Airship user, you can now use our import tool to automatically export your Urban Airship devices and import them into our service. Urban Airship is cutting off their free developer plan on December 31st.

2. For Android 4.1 and greater, we now support customized icons for push action buttons! Simply bundle your icons with your app or link from a url to further customize your push notifications.

3. Notifications can now be cancelled while they are being delivered either through our web dashboard or through a call through our API.

4. Several of our SDKs have received improvements with regards to compatibility with other SDK's. Android apps that require Google Play services will now automatically prompt the user to install said services for your convenience. As always, we highly recommend updating to the latest GameThrive SDK before releasing your app to ensure maximum compatibility.

Many more improvements are coming soon. Stay tuned and have a wonderful holiday!

 

Happy 2015 everyone!

We've had a ton of Unity developers asking us for Amazon notification support and now it's finally ready:



Amazon Notifications work very similarly to Android notifications and are a breeze to set up: http://documentation.gamethrive.com/v1.0/docs/using-gamethrive-in-your-unity-sdk-app

 

Hi community! I've been scouring the web for some kind of push notification service the past week to integrate with my apps. Fortunately, I stumbled upon this thread 2 days ago. The customer support has been stellar and timely. I was able to integrate onto WP8 and Amazon with little difficulty. I'm currently working on Android and then iOS.

I've been developing on Unity for 4 years, have no vested interest in this company whatsoever. I'm just so grateful to finally have push capabilities for my apps and I highly recommend this plugin to anyone with similar needs.

 

Just be sure that you do not have a first generation kindle fire as a test device as they are not capable of push notifications. Found this out the long way, lol.

 

New updates coming your way!

Summary:

• Chrome App & Extension Notifications are now supported
• We've improved our the notification composer UI to have better explanations and examples
• We now support iOS Content-Available notifications (Sometimes called Silent Notifications or Remote Notifications)
• Our plugin has been updated to be compliant with Apple's requirement that all apps have 64 bit support after February 1st.

Details:

Chrome App & Extension Push Notifications

GameThrive now supports sending messages to Google Chrome Applications and Extensions.

Like mobile notificatons, Chrome App notifications can be sent to users even if they don't have your app currently open.

If you publish your app on the Chrome Store, there's no reason not to include notification support. Chrome App notifications are a great way to notify users when you release an update, post news, make app interactions or include reminders to keep your users engaged with your app.



Follow the directions here and you'll be ready to send Chrome Notifications in less than 5 minutes.

Improved Notification Composer UI

We've improved our notification composer to include explanations for each of the available features. Simply hover your mouse over any of the question marks to learn how to use each option.

We've also added the ability to preview your message and see icon placement.



iOS Content-Available Notifications

We now support Content-Available Notifications (sometimes called Silent Notifications or Remote Notifications) for iOS apps.

Content-Available notifications are used to remotely wake up an app in order to load new content, but do not actually cause any notifications to be displayed on the device.

You can also deliver content-available notifications through our API.

iOS 64-bit updates

Starting Feburary 1st, 2015, all iOS apps and the plugins they use will be required to have 64-bit support. All of our plugins have been updated to have 64-bit support to be compliant.

As always, thanks for your continued support and thanks for choosing GameThrive for your Smart Push Notification needs!

 

I like the look of the Unity documentation on your site, very well laid out
http://documentation.gamethrive.com/v1.0/docs/installing-the-gamethrive-sdk

How much does the Game Thrive SDK add to an iOS build ? and I guess while we are here I'm sure others will be wondering the same for Android & Windows.

Thanks,
Scott

 

iOS Build(32 + 64bit) - Should only add about 150KB to the IAP file size.

Windows Phone 8 - 306KB to the XAP file.

Android - 771KB to the APK (worst case). If you are already using other plugins that require google-play-services_lib, android-support-v4.jar, or android-support-v13 it will be less.

 

Glad you like our documentation AppBite! As developers ourselves, we know how important clear and concise documentation is.

We just ran a test to see how much our plugin affects the build size. My coworker posted the results above.

 

There is someway of enabling the Capabilities / Remote Notification from post processing? This will be good to use with Unity Cloud.

 

If I understand your question correctly, then the answer is yes . Our servers handle keeping track of which of your players have opted-in to receiving mobile push notifications, and then we provide a simple UI and API to send and schedule notifications to some or all of your players.

 

We just added A/B Testing support for notifications!

A/B testing allows you to maximize your conversions by sending out 2 different messages to a small subset of your users. You can then decide which message is working better and then send that message out to the rest of your users.

To use it select "A/B Test Messages" on your GameThrive Dashboard. Then, enter your desired content for each message and click send. This will send both messages to a different, small subset of your users.



Wait a moment for results to come in. The charts will update in realtime. When our system says it's confident one message is better, simply click the "Send this message to remaining users" button and everyone who did not receive one of the A/B tested messages will get the message you chose.



We've also added performance tracking to templates used in Automatic Messages.



This will let you see how your templates are performing at a glance.

We're also now up to 1500 developers using our service, including a ton of Unity devs.

 

About to give it a try. Is this still alive and supported? Cause the website link seems to direct me to 'OneSignal.com'

 

@vexe We have changed our name to OneSignal, we still offer the same push notification service just expanded to apps as well as games.

 

You can find our updated forum thread here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/re...rm-push-notification-sdk-and-platform.330702/

 

Thanks for the fast reply. I think there should be a redirect link somewhere in this forum to the other one.

 

Hi,
The mobile push notification tool is quite awesome to get to know about its features but could you tell me please is this notification plugin can work for WordPress Sites. And How much time does it take to set up this plugin?