iOS 14 Support

Airship releases iOS SDK 14 supporting iOS 14.

Today we are releasing Airship SDK 14.1.0, which supports iOS 14 features, most notably App Clips, and addresses Apple’s changes to policies regarding user privacy and permissions.

App Clips

App Clips are the latest notification-related feature available in iOS 14. App Clips are like a mini version of your app, designed to be fast and lightweight so users can open them up quickly and in the moment to meet a particular need. They are designed to be accessible, allowing users to add an App Clip to their device via a website, an NFC tag, a QR code, etc.

App clips support notifications, specifically for transactional use cases. When a user downloads an App Clip, they are automatically opted-in to notifications for 8 hours. After this, you can ask a user if they want to extend notification permissions for up to 1 week.

In this release, we’ve added support for App Clips in our iOS SDK and notifications via our Push and Automation APIs.

Example notification to an App Clip

{
   "notification": {
      "ios": {
         "target_content_id": "https://example.com/restaurants/cafe_portland/order/1234",
         "alert": {
            "title": "Order Status",
            "subtitle": "Cafe Portland",
            "body": "Your order is ready!"
         }
      }
   }
}

To get started with App Clips see our iOS override documentation in our API reference and our App Clips documentation in our iOS docs.

Channel Capture Tool

Due to changes in Apple security policies, we have also redesigned our Channel Capture Tool, a troubleshooting utility that is used frequently by our Support and Technical Account Management teams on customer issues.

This new solution no longer requires our SDK to read a token from the end user’s clipboard. Instead, we will detect the user entering a certain state on their device based on specific behavior, at which point we will write their channel ID to their clipboard. The ID can then be shared with the Airship team to help the customer with their issue.

User Privacy & Data Use

iOS 14 introduces a new permission setting called “Asking Permission to Track.” With this change, you must obtain a user’s permission through the AppTrackingTransparency framework to track them or access their device’s advertising identifier (IDFA).

While Apple originally stated at WWDC that gathering this permission would be required with iOS 14, they have since announced that apps won’t be required to collect user permission until early 2021.

The Airship SDK does not collect IDFAs by default nor do we do any tracking of data across apps by default. However, if you use the advertising ID in the Airship SDK in order to track users across different apps and websites, starting in early 2021 you will be required to get the user’s permission to do this. This includes if you use the advertising ID to track users across apps via any of our partner integrations as well.

Location Permission Changes

With iOS 14, Apple has introduced a new location accuracy level, approximate location. This level gives users more control when sharing sensitive information with apps, i.e., granting only approximate location rather than exact location.

These changes may impact your users’ experience if you use location services. To learn more about how our location partners are addressing these changes, see their recent blog posts on the subject:

Learn More

Getting Started

See our iOS Getting Started guide to start using our new SDK.

If you are upgrading from a previous version of our SDK, see our Migration guide .