Push Notification

How push differs from pull delivery

The technical core of a push notification is that the server, not the client, decides when to deliver. When new data becomes available, the server sends it to the device, typically over a persistent connection maintained by a platform service like Apple's APNs or Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging. The client does not poll on a schedule; it simply receives.

Pull delivery inverts this. In a pull model the client is responsible for checking: refreshing a page, reopening a dashboard, or polling an endpoint at some interval. The trade-off is a familiar one. Push gives near-real-time delivery and avoids the wasted requests of constant polling, but it depends on a live connection and on the user having opted in. Pull gives the client full control over when and how often it checks, at the cost of latency and the burden of remembering to look. For a competitor-tracking workflow, that distinction is the whole point of the working definition: a push notification removes the requirement that the user check a dashboard to learn a competitor moved.

Push notification vs. alert

These two words are often used interchangeably, but they sit at different levels. An alert is the broader concept: a piece of urgent, actionable information that warrants attention, independent of how it travels. A push notification is one specific delivery mechanism: an operating-system banner or tray entry, or a browser prompt, that can carry an alert to the device.

The same competitor alert can reach a user by email, by Slack message, by SMS, or by push notification, and only the last of those is literally a push notification. Keeping the distinction straight matters when a CI team designs its routing. Choosing push is a choice about immediacy and interruption, not about what the alert says. A price-change alert routed to push demands attention now; the same alert folded into a daily email digest is the same information delivered on the reader's schedule. The content is identical; the channel changes how urgently it lands.

How CI teams use push as a delivery channel

In competitive-intelligence and competitor-tracking products, push notification is one option in a set of delivery channels that also includes email and Slack. The system detects a competitor action, a pricing-page edit, a new job posting, a press release, a launch, and then decides how to surface it. Push is reserved for the events where speed of awareness is the value, and where a banner on a phone or desktop is more likely to be seen than an email that waits in an inbox.

Because push is inherently interruptive, teams tier it by priority or severity. High-severity signals, a direct competitor cutting prices, or entering a key account's market, justify a push; lower-severity changes are better batched into a digest or newsletter so the notification stream stays credible. This tiering is a deliberate guard against alert fatigue: a push channel that fires on every trivial DOM change trains users to swipe it away, and the one notification that mattered gets dismissed with the rest.

Native push, web push, and email compared

Push notifications come in two main forms. Native mobile push, delivered through APNs or Firebase Cloud Messaging, requires an installed app and the user's permission; it can reach the lock screen and notification tray even when the app is closed. Web push is delivered through the browser without a dedicated app install, extending the same server-initiated model to desktop and web. Both contrast with in-app notifications, which only appear while the user is actively using the app.

Email is a different animal and is worth separating cleanly. Push is built for immediate, short, glanceable content that demands attention in the moment; it is length-constrained and opt-in by device permission. Email carries longer, more detailed content that the recipient reads on their own schedule, and it tolerates depth a banner cannot. In a competitor-tracking stack the two are complementary rather than competing: push for the handful of changes that cannot wait, email for the fuller context and the rollups that reward a considered read.

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