One of the big reason developers hate mobile websites is that they lack of “push notification” feature that help re-engage people with native apps. However, it looks like Facebook has found the right solution for it.
The social media giant sees a ton of users on its mobile site, especially in the developing world where data budgets are tight, yet it had trouble pulling them back in. Today, Facebook announced that after working with Google on its new mobile web alerts standard, m.facebook.com mobile web users can now opt to receive push notifications via Chrome.
Google announced the development of its third-party push API through Chrome back in April and noted some partners like eBay and Vice News who had committed to implementing the standard. Now Facebook has rolled out the feature, so mobile Chrome users on m.facebook.com will be asked to turn on Chrome pushes.
While social networking addicts who aren’t as concerned about data rates might prefer the high-performing native Facebook app, in emerging markets, the mobile site is very popular. It’s lean, doesn’t burn much data, and doesn’t require app updates.
The companies are hoping to devise ways to limit those duplicate alerts by detecting what someone’s preferred interface is and only pushing them there. Done right, push notifications could help the mobile web compete with native apps. Not every business or service needs a full-scale native app. Now they could get the re-engagement opportunities of native with the ease of construction that the mobile web provides.
By working together, Facebook was able to get assistance nailing the experience, while Google got to learn about bugs and issues that only appear at Facebook’s enormous scale. That was a big theme of today’s Facebook @Scale engineering conference that drew coders from across Silicon Valley to a day of these kinds of announcements. Tech giants don’t always have to compete.