Startup tracks data on popular apps’ mobile push notifications

Details on the effectiveness of mobile notifications

Everyone has a favorite app and more apps are added to the “favorite” list every day. For businesses, apps can simplify how you interact with co-workers and clients alike, but what if you could use an app to help monitor the competition?

Batch Insights is a new app from the co-founders of AppGratis, aimed at doing that very thing. Batch Insights is an aggregator for mobile push notifications. It gives you the ability to search, filter, and control notifications from thousands of the most popular apps. For businesses, this is a great way to keep an eye on the competition and see how your push notifications compare.

AppGratis was a discovery service: you would receive a daily notification to download the promoted app, while that app is no long a part of the App Store, the co-founders have revamped their energy towards Batch Insights.

Large scale tracking of push notifications

Push notification tracking, especially on this large of a scale, could be a great tool to keep in your app toolbox. It could be useful for a variety of fields, not just big corporations. For example, social media managers can keep a check on how often their competition sends out push notifications.

Game developers can see what types of push notifications are most successful at bringing people back to their games: free play, extra incentives, etc. Journalists can use it to keep tabs on breaking news without the need to visit multiple sites and analysts can see which company uses the most push notifications, as well as how they are utilized.

How do they track so many data points?

You may wonder how the company collects all their notifications; while there is no full disclosure, their CEO, Simon Dawlat, stated, while “I can’t explain in full details how we’re doing it for obvious competitive reasons…I can say that we combine a lot of mobile virtual machine activity with network proxying to collect the notifications,” in an interview with Tech Crunch’s Roman Dillet.

Batch Insights has a plan to release an API soon, which will help users better understand and track this data. It will be interesting to see how Batch Insights measures up against other aggregators, but for now, it looks like this could be a useful tool for monitoring push notifications across the board.