I'm and I'm the product manager in charge of apps for . Today we are releasing updates to our that will allow users to opt in to receive breaking news .
Push notifications allow users to be alerted to breaking news stories on their smartphone or tablet in a form similar to a text message, even when they aren鈥檛 using their 主播大秀 News app. It's one of the most commonly requested features for our apps so it's great to be able to roll it out.
Push notifications on iOS and Android
One of the other features we get a huge amount of requests for is landscape support in our Android app for smartphones and mid-size tablets and I'm pleased to say we are including that in our latest release as well.
These features will be available for Android users on version 2.3 or higher of the operating system and to iOS users on version 5.0 or higher.
The release of push notifications has been tied in to some changes we have made to the content management system used by 主播大秀 News journalists.
Sharing breaking news alerts and other information across a number of different platforms was becoming a time-consuming task for our journalists and news gatherers.
So we developed a Breaking News Tool which means that journalists can write a news flash once and publish to all relevant platforms in one fell swoop including Twitter, SMS, e-mail and push notifications.
If you sign up for push notifications you will hear about only the biggest breaking news of the day, typically just one or two stories in 24 hours.
For the real news junkies in our audience our account on Twitter is the place to hear all the significant stories of the day.
So how does it all work?
For a device to receive a push notification the owner of the device first needs to subscribe to receive them.
So when you update your 主播大秀 News app you'll get a message asking whether you want to receive notifications from us.
If you say 'yes', a unique device token is generated and stored in our Push Notification Service.
The unique device token also needs to be registered with the messaging service run by the provider of your device鈥檚 operating system - in this case Android has and iOS has .
When we store the token in our system we also associate it with a particular 'tag' which is used to identify the types of messages that device should receive.
For now that's just breaking news, but in future we could allow our users to sign up based on their particular interests i.e. someone could choose just business or entertainment.
When a big story breaks a journalist will use the Breaking News Tool to send a message to the Push Notification Service and indicate whether this should be sent to users of our app inside the UK, outside the UK or both.
The service then finds the appropriate device tokens and sends them on to Apple and Google along with the message for delivery.
Even while the notification is being sent, our editorial team will be updating the appropriate article or creating a new one if it's a brand new story.
If you receive a notification and tap to find out more your device will open up your 主播大秀 News app on the appropriate article, if it's available by then, with all the latest details.
So now you can keep right up to date with the most important news as it happens.
I hope you find it a useful feature, please do let me know what you think.
Alex Perry is the executive product manager for 主播大秀 News apps.
You can download the 主播大秀 News app on iOS at the and on Android at the .