Today we’re excited to announce that you can use the Mason APIs to send custom notifications to all of your devices. We kicked off our API project earlier this quarter, starting with providing the ability to read devices, manage groups, and some limited ability to send notifications such as reboot or check for updates. Allowing users to programmatically manage devices is a core part of our product vision at Mason.
Over the next several months, we will continue adding APIs to make it possible to automate everything that you can do in our UI today.
Announcing Custom Broadcasts—Push Notifications Made Easy!
You can now remotely send Android broadcasts to your devices out-of-the-box. This will allow secure remote communication from your infrastructure to your devices.
Some examples where you might use this include
- You can send new advertising material to a kiosk display.
- A hospital can send a broadcast to ask a patient a question over an in-room device.
- A restaurant can receive a broadcast when new orders come in.
We have created an example of how to set up your Android application using only a few lines of code. You can read more about it in our to configure in the Mason docs: https://docs.bymason.com/broadcast/.
Managing Broadcasts and Device Lifetime
Mason devices use a protocol called MQTT on our devices. This protocol keeps an active, battery efficient, connection that you can query cheaply and with high accuracy to see if the device is awake and can receive broadcasts. We call this API ping.
Ping returns if a device is online or how long since it last checked in. Additionally, it provides a list of any pending broadcasts waiting to be sent to the device. We imagine this will be useful for your Support or Operations teams to check the health of your fleet, build reporting, or check if any devices might need to be checked in on.
Summary of What’s New
In addition to the ping and broadcast API, we have improved a number of other APIs as part of this release.
- OS level broadcasts to allow you to send requests to heartbeat, check for updates, reboot, shutdown, or wipe the device.
- New scopes to allow you to control exactly what broadcasts are allowed through your APIKeys.
- Reading the device model now includes network usage as reported by the device.
