What is Push Notification?

Looking for a new email or maybe you have one and just noticed this as a feature? We know what "push" means, and what "notifications" are, but put in a technological light, what does the phrase "push notification" mean? This is, thankfully, one of the times that a technological phrase means exactly what it says. Push notifications are when notifications (emails, messages, etc.) are "pushed" to your device.

A good (though not quite perfect) example of this is email. I have two email accounts; One has push notification, one doesn't. When I look at my smart phone to see if I have any emails, I'll have a number next to my email icon if I received an email to the account with push notification. That's because the email was "pushed" down to my phone as soon as it arrived. If I want to see if I have any emails to my other account (the one without push notification), I have to open up my email and tell it to check for new messages. This is called "fetching" because I'm telling my device to go up to where the emails are held and fetch copies of them.



Another way of explaining it, if you're not that familiar with email, is like your actual mail. Normally, you have to go out to your mailbox to see if you received any mail today. That's how normal email works. If, on the other hand, every time you received a new piece of mail the mailman came up to your door, knocked, and hand delivered each piece to you as it arrived at the post office that would be "pushed." (And yes, I know it would be physically impossible, but that's how convenient push is for mail.)

The email analogy isn't perfect though because emails aren't really "notifications" per se, but I find that to be the easiest way for people to originally understand the idea. Normally, notifications are things like in the above image: small notifications sent from applications you have on your device that pop up when they are triggered. This could be upgrade notifications, news reports, weather alerts, reminders, etc., but the general term "push" is universal between all those examples and the email analogy.

Practical Tip of the Day:
Most applications have a default setup for what things trigger notifications and how they're displayed. If you find that you're getting too many notifications from a particular app, go into the settings. There is almost always a way to minimize or even turn off notifications for individual or all applications.