Over 13 million people in 144 countries participated in World Cleanup Day this September 15th. Initiated by Natacha, our iOS developer, the GoodBarber team got together to be a part of this worldwide event. We chose to clean up the roadside area of one of the main highways in Ajaccio, where our headquarters are located. 

More and more of you are shifting over to Progressive Web Apps and we couldn't be happier about it. Your feedback has allowed us to identify which aspects of PWAs to work on in order to provide you with a tool that meets your needs as much as possible. 

This month, we worked on two points concerning PWAs that came directly from your suggestions. 

The emergence of Progressive Web Apps meant the arrival of a new possibility: sending web push notifications.

They are received by users directly in their web browser.

This feature is supported by the majority of recent browsers, and the list of them is growing every day .  

If you've subscribed to a native GoodBarber offer and you've activated the PWA version of your app, you have the option to send push notifications to your native iOS, Android, and PWA users.

Being able to directly contact all of your users regardless of the device they're using is a significant advantage. 

On the other hand, in some cases it can be a good idea to adapt your communication based on the type of user.

Certain messages may only apply to web users (to get them to install the application for example), or only native iOS users (maybe to inform them of an update that only concerns iPhones).

Basically, it's good to have the option to target users based on their platform, and now this is possible. 

You know that Progressive Web Apps are accessible via a URL, indexed by search engines, and can therefore potentially be used by all web users. 

This is a huge advantage in terms of visibility and audience acquisition in most cases, however in certain situations, it can actually be a setback.  

Maybe you want to take advantage of all the perks of a progressive web app, but for its content to be available only to a private audience, like in the case of enterprise apps?

Now it's possible, thanks to a new feature:

A few months ago the Cambridge Analytica scandal occurred. This British company, specializing in large scale data analysis and communications consulting, was accused of using 87 million Facebook users' data without their knowledge for political marketing purposes. 
 

Facebook, who ended up in the middle of all the turmoil, made the decision to entirely remodel its policy concerning the protection of its users' data. The goal of this approach was obviously to reinforce security, especially with regards to user data shared with third party applications. 

Personal data security has been a major issue in 2018, so Facebook's solutions are not surprising. This will have some impact on your GoodBarber application, if you use a Facebook connector in one of your pages. 

It's time to introduce you to the latest version of one of our advanced add-ons: Live + 

For those who aren't familiar with this add-on, it's an audio player that allows you to broadcast an M3U feed and to display metadata associated with the track being played, such as the title, name of the artist, and album cover.