Out-of-the-Box Message Center makes Airship’s flagship rich messaging feature, Message Center, available to all customers using iOS or Android SDK 7.0.0 or later, without requiring a separate integration. Read on for context, a description of the benefits, and for links to additional resources.

What Is Message Center?

Airship Message Center is a place in your app where you can display persistent rich messages, including HTML, video, etc. The messages are hosted by Airship, and are typically displayed in standard inbox-style within your app. You can choose to display the messages and the message listings any way you wish, according to the look and feel of your app. We do our part by hosting the rich content, alerting users of new content with push notifications, and managing the state of each user’s message listing (read, unread, deleted, etc.).

Message Center on iOS

Message Center on Android

Reach Opted-out Users

Message Center messages are not push notifications, but you can use push notifications to alert users that new rich content is available. Because Message Center messages do not require a user to opt in to push notifications, you can reach opted-out audience with Message Center.

More Opportunities to Engage

When users interact with Message Center, e.g., read, delete, tap a button, Airship tracks the interactions and makes them available via our analytics offerings, Connect and Insight.

By providing engaging content and facilitating interactions via Message Center, you can also trigger other Actions such as adding a tag, or triggering a follow-up notification.

OK, so why is it better out of the box?

With the release of the 7.0 SDK, Message Center, the actual container for the rich content you provide to customers, ships with the SDK. Previously, you needed to do extra development work to design the UI elements that displayed the rich messages. Although we provide sample code to get you started, integration could often add weeks or months to your development cycle, depending on the number of stakeholders involved.

Now, every app using the latest SDK is equipped with a supported version of Message Center, giving every Airship customer another highly effective tool for their mobile engagement toolkit.

Simple Theming

Theming your Message Center to match the look and feel of your app is easy, requiring changes configuration file in your iOS or Android/Amazon project. Change the colors, fonts, backgrounds and icons to match your branding.

See Styling the iOS Message Center reference and Styling the Android Message Center to get started theming.