Remote Control / Service

Remotely control your app's behaviour without App Store updates

The behaviour of the Critical Moments SDK is controlled by a powerful config file, which can be remotely updated from a server without app updates. Changing the SDK config unlocks a powerful set of features:

• Update the conditional targeting to optimize your revenue engine (eg: Subscription prompts)

• Update your user journey conditional targeting and messaging to improve user activation

• Update your app review prompt conditional targeting

• Push new user messaging for unexpected issues and announcements. Examples: outages, announcements, or legal compliance (new privacy policy, or EU data regulations)

• Updating which feature flags are on/off, including rolling out AB test segments, rolling back bugs, and targeting feature flags based on live-device conditions.

Who Hosts the Remote Config?

You do! You can host our config anywhere your company hosts files on the web.

Other feature flag and remote-messaging tools require learning new dashboards, adding new access controls, creating new review processes, and sometimes even hosting/monitoring new services. Critical Moments allows you to use your existing tools (Git, Github, your webserver, etc)!

We offer a guide for quickly setting up free hosting using Github Pages, which should work for companies at any scale.

Trustless: Security and SLA

Since you host the config file yourself, Critical Moments can't push updates to your config without your permission/consent.

Further: an outage of our service can't impact your users.

How to Host Your Config / Remote Updates

Considerations if you want to use a host other than Github

If you want to use another host for your config, here are some best practices to consider:

• Choose a hosting provider that has robust access controls, to control who on your team can update this config. Since this config can push messaging to all your users, you want to keep this secure and limit updates to trusted team members.

• If using a custom domain name, use one you own, keep secure, and intend to keep owning for the lifetime of your application.

• Choose a hosting provider which supports the ETag header is best, and will reduce the amount of network traffic from your app. Almost all major hosts support this, including Github Pages, Amazon S3, Google GCP Cloud Storage, and Microsoft Azure.

• Choose hosting provider you already use, and is familiar to your dev/ops team

Once you pick a URL, update your code to point to it (in your app delegate's call to setReleaseConfigUrl, see the Quick Start guide). This must be done before you release to the app store.

Be sure to test everything works as desired before deploying a new config to your production host. Remember: if deploying to a config to a URL used by older app releases, ensure to not break them with new configs.

Trustless: Access Control

Each company has different ways of securing their services and granting employees access.

By self-hosting the config file, you can use your existing access control systems to match the way you already work, and comply with your internal security requirements.

Trustless SaaS

Critical Moments is built as what we call "Trustless SaaS": software designed to be remotely controlled from services, without needing to trust a 3rd party service provider for correctness, security, or uptime SLAs.

Learn more about Trustless SaaS ->