Introducing in-app message types
Today we're excited to announce the beta release of in-app message types. Building on our in-app messaging components release, with today's release you can now power any UI element in your product—a banner, a carousel, a tag, anything—using Knock's workflow engine and real-time messaging infrastructure. Here's how it works.
In-app message types enable you to map UI elements and components from your application to a message type in Knock. Once you've created a message type, you can use it to target and send native messages to that component in your own product, powered by Knock's real-time messaging infrastructure.
In-app message types are a powerful way for your engineering team to own the structure and implementation of in-app messages displayed to your users, while giving product managers and marketers the flexibility to create and manage the in-app messages sent to your users through Knock's powerful visual workflow builder.
Each in-app message type has a schema that determines the fields available to your content editors when building a new in-app message. Schemas are versioned and can be updated over time to create strong guarantees between the structure expected in your components and the messages exposed over the API.
To render components for a given message type, you use our React SDK and hooks to fetch any messages of that type for the current user. Knock owns the data layer, while your team owns the component, making it possible to create native in-app messaging that leverages your existing design system and component library. This also means that native in-app messaging powered with Knock is just as performant as the rest of your app, and won't be blocked by ad blockers. You can read more and see examples in the documentation.
In-app message types are currently in beta. If you're interested in trying them out, please contact our team.