Push deliverability for Chinese Android devices

Some Android devices manufactured by Chinese Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), such as Xiaomi, OPPO, and Vivo, optimize for longer battery lives through aggressive app lifecycle management. This optimization may have the unintended consequence of shutting down background app processing, which can reduce the deliverability of your push notifications.

To make sure that your app’s messaging performance works as expected on these devices, your marketing and engineering teams should collaborate and follow the steps outlined in this article.

Steps for developers

These OEMs perform their optimizations through aggressive killing of background applications and blocking them from self starting to run background tasks. As a developer, you’ll need to configure your app to ask the user to ease these restrictions whenever possible.

This can be achieved by having your app automatically start on your end user’s device, which gives your app permission to run in the background and listen for messages from Braze. Unfortunately, since this is an OEM-specific problem and not an Android problem, there are no documented APIs for bringing up the auto-start permission prompt for each OEM.

To solve for this, integrate a library like AutoStarter into your application. AutoStarter supports multiple manufacturers, giving you an easy way to call the startup permission manager on a wide array of devices. After you have integrated AutoStarter, call AutoStartPermissionHelper.getInstance().getAutoStartPermission(context) to bring up the startup permission manager on your end user’s device. Couple this action with a prompt encouraging the end user to enable “auto-start” for your app. Your marketing team will craft this message—see the next section!

Steps for marketers

After your users opt in to receive push notifications, there are additional steps they can take on their end to improve message delivery for these devices. We recommend you follow up your push primer message with an in-app message targeted to users on Chinese OEM devices with these additional steps:

• Enable “auto-start” for the app
• Disable battery optimization for the app

To further amplify your message, add other channels to resurface information from unopened push notifications through out-of-app channels such as SMS, WhatsApp, and LINE and in-app channels like in-app messages and Content Cards. Your users will be able to see anything they might have missed the next time they open the app.