Concepts Overview

All the tools at your disposal

This is a quick summary of all of the concepts in the Critical Moments SDK. Each is documented in detail later in this developer guide.

• Notifications: delivery mobile notifications to your users, without a push server

• Smart Notifications: wait for the ideal moment to delivery a notification. For example, when the user is holding their device and at home.

• Conditionals are boolean string expressions that can be evaluated with the current state of the users device or event history. For example device_orientations == 'face_up' || has_wifi. They can be used for advanced targeting or optimizing.

• Properties can be built in, or custom properties. They are the data points used in conditions, like has_wifi.

• Events are logged when something happens, like a user action, or the app launching. They can be used to trigger actions, or you can query the event history in conditionals.

• The events and properties database tracks all past events and past property states in a private database. These can be queried in conditionals.

• Actions can be fired when events occur or conditions are met. A wide array of options are built into the SDK including showing modal popups, banner announcements, alerts, requesting app reviews, launching webpages, app deeplinks, and more. You can add you own custom actions, tying into parts of your app.

• Triggers bind events to actions, firing an action when an event occurs.

• Feature Flags enable you to disable a feature without modifying your source code or requiring a redeploy. Critical Moments feature flags use the conditional system for advanced targeting

• Themes update the color and fonts of our action UI to match the look and feel of your brand.

• The Config File binds all of the above concepts together. Even native UI actions can be defined in the config. By defining these in config instead of code we enable AB tests, iterative optimizations and powerful updates, launched with unprecended flexibility.

• Remote Update allows you to update your app's behaviour outside of the app store release cycle. This is useful for dealing with unexpected scenarios like showing an announcement in app, outages, disabling bugs, and more.