Android Oreo Channels

Contents

• What are Notification Channels?
• Notification Channel priorities
• Setting up Notification Channels
  • Channel ID and Channel Name
• Sending out a push message through Notification Channels

What are Notification Channels?

Coming with Android Oreo, Notification Channels provide you with the ability to group the notifications that your application sends into manageable groups. Once your notifications are in these channels, you no longer have input into their functionality — so it is up to the user to manage these channels.

See the following links for more information:

Android Central - Notification Channels

Notification Channel priorities

Low

• When collapsed, only the title is shown in one line with the application name and creation date of the notification.
• Small image previews are not available in collapsed mode.
• When expanded, the notification looks like a regular expanded notification.
• Does not play notification sound.
• The notification's icon is not displayed in the status bar.

Medium

• Expanded and collapsed notifications look as usual.
• Does not play notification sound.

High

• Plays notification sound.

Urgent

• Displays a heads-up notification. On Oreo, heads-up notifications are not set on a per notification basis, rather on a per channel basis. This means that if you post into a channel that has Urgent importance, then that notification will display as a heads-up notification on Oreo devices. Keep in mind that the user can lower the importance of channels, so it is not guaranteed that your channel will remain in the Urgent category.

Setting up Notification Channels

Please follow the guide here if you want to use full potential of Android Oreo’s Notification Channels.

• Create a Notification Channel(s) within your app.
  • For an example on how to create notification channels in your application follow our Sample application's implementation.
• Assign a Channel ID and Channel Name to your channels.
• In your Emarsys account, go to Campaigns > Mobile Engage > Apps and select the application you want to edit.

• On General Settings, under Platforms, click the edit icon to edit the Android Platform.

Channel ID and Channel Name

Set up the channel ID and channel name of your application.

Note

The channels specified here need to be present in the application already.

Also make sure that the Channel name in the Mobile Engage frontend is the same as the channel ID in the Notification Channel setup.

If you are using the Mobile Engage SDK default channel, the channel ID will be always ems_me_default.

Note

In Emarsys SDK we removed the default channels, you have to create them for yourself!

If channels are not set, the app will not crash, but your push message will not be delivered and you will find an error in your application logs similar to this one:

No Channel found for pkg=com.emarsys.sample, channelId=null...

Sending out a push message through Notification Channels

Once your channels are set up, you can select them in the push message interface on Content Creation tab under Android while creating your push message, selectable by Channel name: