Urban Airship (Airship)

Overview

Airship, originally founded as Urban Airship in 2009, operates as a customer engagement platform specializing in mobile-first interactions. The platform is designed for enterprise clients seeking to manage and automate personalized communications across various digital channels. Its core functionality revolves around delivering targeted messages such as push notifications, in-app messages, SMS, and email. Airship aims to facilitate the orchestration of complex customer journeys, allowing businesses to define sequences of interactions based on user behavior and preferences.

The platform provides a suite of tools for audience segmentation, content personalization, and message delivery scheduling. It incorporates predictive artificial intelligence capabilities to assist in identifying optimal engagement times and content for individual users. Airship supports a range of mobile and web platforms through its comprehensive SDKs, including iOS, Android, React Native, and Flutter. This broad SDK support allows developers to integrate Airship's engagement features into diverse application environments.

Airship is positioned for organizations that require large-scale mobile push notification capabilities and advanced multi-channel campaign management. It is often utilized by companies with extensive customer bases that need to deliver personalized experiences and drive specific user actions within their mobile applications. The platform's focus on compliance, including SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA, addresses data privacy and security requirements for regulated industries. Its enterprise-grade infrastructure is built to handle high volumes of messages and user data, making it suitable for organizations with demanding engagement strategies.

Key features

• Push Notifications: Delivers targeted alerts and messages to mobile device users, supporting rich media and interactive buttons.
• In-App Messaging: Provides customizable messages and banners displayed within the mobile application interface, often used for onboarding, promotions, or feature announcements.
• SMS Messaging: Enables direct text message communication for alerts, promotions, and transactional messages.
• Email Campaigns: Supports the creation and delivery of email marketing campaigns, integrated with user segments and journey orchestration.
• Wallet Passes: Facilitates the creation and management of digital passes for Apple Wallet and Google Pay, used for loyalty cards, coupons, and event tickets.
• Predictive AI: Utilizes machine learning to analyze user behavior and predict optimal engagement times, content preferences, and churn risk.
• Journeys: A visual builder for designing and automating multi-step, multi-channel customer engagement workflows based on user actions and segment membership.
• Audience Segmentation: Tools for defining and managing dynamic user segments based on demographics, behavior, and custom attributes.
• A/B Testing: Capabilities to test different message variations, content, and delivery times to optimize campaign performance.
• Analytics and Reporting: Provides dashboards and reports on message delivery, open rates, conversions, and overall campaign effectiveness.

Pricing

Airship operates on a custom enterprise pricing model. Specific pricing tiers or public rates are not listed on their website. Prospective customers are directed to contact their sales department for a personalized quote based on their specific usage requirements, feature needs, and scale of operations.

Common integrations

• Mobile SDKs: Direct integration with iOS, Android, Flutter, React Native, Cordova, Xamarin, tvOS, and watchOS applications for native engagement features. Developers can find detailed instructions in the Airship documentation.
• Web SDK: Integration for web applications to enable web push notifications and in-app messages on websites.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Integration with CRM platforms to synchronize customer data and personalize engagement campaigns.
• Customer Data Platforms (CDP): Connects with CDPs to leverage unified customer profiles for advanced segmentation and journey orchestration.
• Analytics Platforms: Exports engagement data to analytics tools for deeper insights into user behavior and campaign performance.

Alternatives

• Braze: Offers a comprehensive customer engagement platform with a focus on multi-channel messaging, journey orchestration, and personalization.
• OneSignal: Provides a platform for push notifications, in-app messaging, email, and SMS, often used for its free tier and broad platform support.
• Amplitude: Primarily an analytics platform that also offers some engagement features, focusing on product growth and user behavior insights.
• Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM): A free messaging solution from Google for sending push notifications to Android, iOS, and web clients, often used by developers for basic notification needs.
• Iterable: Another enterprise-focused customer engagement platform known for its flexible data integration and workflow automation capabilities.

Getting started

To begin integrating Airship into an iOS application, developers typically add the Airship SDK via Swift Package Manager or CocoaPods and configure it within the application delegate. The following Swift example demonstrates a basic setup for initializing the Airship SDK and enabling push notifications.

import AirshipKit
import UIKit

@main
class AppDelegate: UIResponder, UIApplicationDelegate {

    func application(_ application: UIApplication, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: [UIApplication.LaunchOptionsKey: Any]?) -> Bool {
        // Set Airship config
        let config = AirshipConfig.defaultConfig()
        config.developmentAppKey = "YOUR_DEVELOPMENT_APP_KEY"
        config.developmentAppSecret = "YOUR_DEVELOPMENT_APP_SECRET"
        config.productionAppKey = "YOUR_PRODUCTION_APP_KEY"
        config.productionAppSecret = "YOUR_PRODUCTION_APP_SECRET"
        config.isProduction = true // Set to false for development environment

        // Take off! 🚀
        Airship.takeOff(config, launchOptions: launchOptions)

        // Enable user notifications
        Airship.push.userPushNotificationsEnabled = true
        Airship.push.defaultPresentationOptions = [.alert, .sound, .badge]

        // Optional: Set a named user for personalization
        Airship.namedUser.identifier = "user_id_123"

        print("Airship SDK initialized and push enabled.")
        return true
    }

    // MARK: UISceneSession Lifecycle (for iOS 13+)
    func application(_ application: UIApplication, configurationForConnecting connectingSceneSession: UISceneSession, options: UIScene.ConnectionOptions) -> UISceneConfiguration {
        return UISceneConfiguration(name: "Default Configuration", sessionRole: connectingSceneSession.role)
    }

    func application(_ application: UIApplication, didDiscardSceneSessions sceneSessions: Set) {
        // Called when the user discards a scene session.
    }
}

This code snippet initializes the Airship SDK with provided application keys and secrets, then enables user push notifications. Developers should replace placeholder keys with their actual Airship credentials found in their project settings. Further configuration, such as setting up a named user for personalized targeting, can be added as needed. For detailed installation steps and platform-specific guides, refer to the Airship iOS SDK documentation.