OneSignal

I love OneSignal. For those that don’t know they provide mobile push notification for your apps. They recently also added e-mail notifications. There are other providers that do this, but I have not found any that are low-cost or free. OneSignal is free. Completely free. It doesn’t matter how small or large you are. I never question a company revenue methods. I was just glad it was free.

I used them for years for cuadros. When the GDPR deadline approached I looked at what kind of data they collected and for what purpose to add it to the consent dialog. And then I realized that the reason that it is free, is because they collect data to sell. As with most of these privacy policies, they amount to a bunch of maybe will collect this data or that data statements.  I didn’t feel comfortable adding all that information to the consent dialog and I didn’t think anybody would consent to the random list of possible data elements.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. The Corona plugin is a native plugin meaning that OneSignal wrapped up their iOS and Android plugin in a Lua facade. The Corona plugin has not been updated in a while which resulted in a nasty bug when building for Oreo (probably Pie also).

Since it appeared that it was not going to be fixed in a reasonable timeframe I decided to use their REST API to create a fully Lua solution. I also figured that I could limit or at least know exactly what data I would be sending and this would make the process of being GDPR compliant easier.

Last week was a long weekend, and I didn’t have any day work spill over to the weekend. So I took the opportunity to write it. I am excited that I’ll be able to inform users of new features and other random things. Don’t worry, I know less is more when we talk about push notification.