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Hey, team of super users!


Brent
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Hey, team of super users!

Am wondering if anyone has any experience with setting up mobile push. Keen to know if I can set up the SDK in our iOS app and push out updates to the iPads without activating the Intercom Messenger - i.e. I want to send messages but not hear back through the app or have anyone create new support messages via that channel.

Anyone come across that before or have any thoughts?

4 replies

  • 0 replies
  • July 5, 2022

Hey @brent w​! 

 

You'll need to initialise the iOS SDK in your iPad app, as we use that to get/update device tokens on the Intercom side of things. We need those to effectively deliver push notifications to your customers.

 

You can set up the iOS SDK so that none of its features are exposed in your app, though (eg. hidden launcher, no buttons that trigger the Messenger etc), and you can manually handle those notifications so they don't trigger the Messenger (docs). You can also add targeting to your outbound in-product messages (eg. Posts, Mobile Carousels etc) so that they don't appear on iPad devices.

 

That all works fine if you're only sending outbound push messages.. but your customers will also start receiving notifications for conversation replies if they have them. It sounds like you don't want that?

 

I'm not aware of a way to get around that limitation, but leave it with me and I'll double check with the team today.

 

I'd be interested in learning more about your use case.. sounds like it's probably a reactivation use case, maybe? Is there a reason you're keen not to use the rest of the iOS SDK's features in your iPad app?


Brent
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  • July 5, 2022

Thanks for your quick reply @Mathew Cropper​ 

Yes, you're right that we don't want conversations appearing - we'd like it to be a one way push of selected posts.

 

I'll try to describe my use case.

We have two apps - the web app (with a set of users with different roles), and an iOS app with a single login.

Intercom is only made visible to users with the "Boss" role and displays on the web app only (there can be more than one boss). The boss role also is the single login for the iOS app.

 

We're a point of sale solution for hospitality businesses - so the people using the iOS app (that is logged in as the boss user) could be a waiter, a barista, a cashier, the chef etc. Multiple people use the iOS app but we don't want everyone and sundry having access to the help messenger - we leave that to a super-user (the boss) on the web app to answer the questions of their staff and come to us if they need help.

 

There will be some updates that we make that we'd like to push out to the iOS app so that more end users can see them and, in turn, increase the adoption of new functionality. Hospitality owners are very time-poor and our readership stats for Intercom messages sometimes struggle. So having another channel to communicate might help us here.

 

So with all that being said, we do not want a waiter reading the chat logs of a boss that might be asking about something about their revenue, or something that is sensitive in nature.

 

Hope that makes sense and it would be awesome if you could follow up with the team on disabling the chat.

 

 


  • 0 replies
  • July 5, 2022

Ah! I see.. thanks for sharing all that detail @brent w​. That's super helpful 🙏

 

Let me chat with the team and I'll give you a shout when I know more. I'll be honest, I'm not confident there's a way to globally disable that many Messenger features for a single platform, though 😞

 

I know this is probably a non-starter suggestion because of the disruption it would cause, but is moving to using a non-boss login in the iOS app a possibility? It seems like that's the most obvious option if disabling Messenger features isn't possible, and it would mean a clear separation of user privileges on the device.


Brent
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  • July 5, 2022

Thanks @Mathew Cropper​ Having a non-boss role for login is something we've talked about and we do something similar for another of our add-on apps. It would essentially double our user base if we were to add intercom visibility to that account for this one purpose though, so that would be something we'd have to weigh up. Our plans cost as little as $59 a month so would need to look at what kind of costs might be involved in scaling up that much.


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