For marketers looking to use mobile reach, engage, and retain customers in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, push notification deliverability is something to keep an eye on. Push notifications in the region occasionally fail, in part because certain Chinese Android devices popular in APAC are designed to prioritize battery life over message delivery, which may result in push notifications failing. That’s a consideration for marketers looking to communicate with APAC consumers since nearly 79% of devices in Asia run on Android.

This issue is a systemic one, impacting everyone from local brands to global organizations looking to connect with users in the region, and raising the risk that users in APAC miss impactful push notifications (think “Your order has been shipped” or “A TV show you favorited has new episodes”). Thankfully, Braze offers an elegant solution to this tricky issue: Push Max, a new feature designed to improve push delivery rates on impacted devices by resending failed notifications at times when users are likely to engage.

Curious about what’s at the core of this problem and how Push Max can help address it? Read on.

Battery Life vs. Timely Messaging: How Some Chinese Device Manufacturers Complicate Android Push Delivery

If your marketing team sends an Android push notification to users in APAC, there’s a chance that it won’t reach its intended audience.

Here’s the situation: Some of the mobile devices made by Chinese manufacturers are designed to extend how long a charge lasts by defaulting to battery-saving mechanisms at the expense of background app processing (and, by extension, message delivery). These phones generally block apps from running in the background in order to keep them from eating away at users’ battery life, something that can slow down the delivery of Android push notifications and even stop them completely.

As a result, users of these devices get longer battery life, but they run the risk of missing critical messaging. That, in turn, can result in broken experiences and frustration aimed not at the mobile device manufacturers but at the brands that failed to reach them when needed. This sort of throttled messaging would be concerning for most marketers, even if it affected only a sliver of their target audience, but the popularity of both Android phones and the devices made by popular Chinese mobile device manufacturers makes the issue more common in APAC: Chinese manufacturers held more than 30% of the Asian mobile device market in December 2023.

It’s clear that there’s a segment of users at risk of being affected by this issue. Marketing teams looking to minimize the impact can direct users to manually update their settings to prioritize notifications from their apps, but even with these adjustments, impacted audiences may miss out. To avoid this outcome, brands looking to consistently reach users in the region on push should consider leveraging the Braze platform’s new Push Max tool.

How Push Max Works

The Braze platform’s Push Max feature is designed to capture any failed messaging and keep them from being lost—instead, those notifications are protected and re-sent to affected consumers at another moment that is more likely to reach each affected user. That way, brands looking to engage customers in APAC never miss out on an opportunity to connect with their audience.

Push Max amplifies Android push notifications by automatically tracking and identifying failed messages. When Push Max is used in conjunction with the Braze platform’s Time to Live (TTL) functionality and Intelligent Timing tool, it’s particularly impactful.

TTL can track failed push notifications to Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) service, which delivers push notifications to Android devices. Then, if the messages fail to be delivered, TTL is capable of holding onto the messages for up to 28 days, although you can decrease this period or customize it by message.

To ensure that the next delivery is successful, Intelligent Timing calculates the unique timing to retry the sending of a failed message. This is where the Braze platform’s existing data intelligence really shines. Intelligent Timing determines optimal send time based on a statistical analysis of individual users’ prior app and messaging channel interactions. It’s entirely customized and built alongside data generated as part of a brand’s current marketing flows in Braze, giving marketers a powerful, automated way to increase the odds that a message is delivered, even when device-level settings might complicate the process.

Final Thoughts

For brands big and small, push notifications can play a critical role in the impact of their cross-channel marketing strategy—but only if the people they’re sending those notifications to actually receive them. With Push Max, APAC-focused customer engagement teams can reduce the impact of regional push deliverability challenges and ensure that they have additional coverage to address message delivery failures and to make the most of every interaction with their target audience.

Interested in learning more about Push Max? Check out Braze documentation.