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description: If "this" then "that" for mobile apps
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# What is Critical Moments?

Critical moments is an if "this" then "that" system for mobile apps. You can install our SDK for iOS to unlock a powerful set of tools to help grow your business, speed up development, and increase user satisfaction.

### "This" Triggers

A number of triggers can kick off an action:

* [Events](events): trigger an action when a user performs an action, or built-in actions occur (like `app_start`)
* [Conditions](conditional-targeting/intro-to-conditions): build powerful conditional statements that can evaluate over 100 realtime device states, custom properties, functions and more. For example: `!dark_mode && (device_brightness < 0.1 || hour_of_day > 21)` could be a trigger for promoting your new "dark mode" feature
* Powerful combinations: combine events, realtime conditions, and even past device state history to build advanced targeting for when actions fire

### "That" Actions

When a condition is met, you can perform a wide array of actions:

* Ask users to subscribe or buy: firing your upsell prompts at the right moment can have a 72% increase on conversion rate, while reducing alert fatigue and user distraction
* Ask users to rate your app when they are most likely to give you a great review: after a positive interaction, and while they aren't distrated
* Launch actions built into our SDK like announcement banners,  modal popovers, alerts, web link, deep links, and more
* Enable or disable [feature flags](feature-flags) to control any aspect of your app. Rollout features over time, or even fix bugs after they ship
* Custom actions: link into actions in your codebase

For details on all the actions available, see the [actions overview](actions-in-app-messaging/actions-overview).

### Update anytime from the cloud

[From the cloud you can update your action, conditions, triggers, or how they connect](remote-control-service) at anytime without needing app store updates. You can even add entirely new messages, announcements or features from the cloud.

Shipping updates any time unlocks powerful set of use cases:

* AB test important optimizations like when to ask users to make a purchase or rate your app
* Fix bugs after they ship with conditional feature flags
* Let users know they should update their app (for old builds, or major bugs)
* Targeted user messaging: sending a message to the right user, and the right moment, including in builds that have shipped to app store long ago
* Diffuse outages by letting users know you're on it, and publishing proactive updates

Critical Moments is built as what we call "[Trustless SaaS](trustless-saas)": software designed to be remotely controlled, without tracking your users or needing to trust a 3rd party service provider for correctness, security, or uptime SLAs.

### Privacy Built In

While Critical Moments gives you an deep array of data to target users and optimize, that data never leaves the user's device. Conditional statements are evaluated locally. Our privacy-centric architecture makes it possible to optimize on much more data per user, including realtime signals.

With Critical Moments, powerful targeting and optimization doesn't have to mean compromising user privacy.

### Get Started

Ready to go? Jump to our [**quick start guide**](quick-start) to get rolling.
