TLDR: A “good” open rate depends on your industry, platform, and strategy, not a flat average. This post breaks down direct vs. influenced opens, what drives performance, and how to improve yours. Access Airship’s 2026 Benchmark Report to see where you stand.

Push notifications are one of the highest-performing mobile channels, but “high performance” means something very different depending on your industry, platform, and customer experience strategy. A 30% open rate might be exceptional for one app and mediocre for another, so before you optimize anything, you need a baseline rather than an industry rumor. 

In this article, we’ll break down what makes a push notification rate “good” and how to find the right push notification open rate benchmark for your industry using our 2026 report. 

What is a push notification open rate? 

There are two types of push notification rates: direct opens and influenced opens. 

• Direct open rates refer to the percentage of mobile users who open a push notification and launch your app. 
• Influenced open rates count actions such as purchases and sign-ups within a set attribution window after a user received or saw a push notification. Let’s say a customer sees a limited-time offer notification, but doesn’t make a purchase until an hour later. This would fall into your attribution window.  

The direct open rate is the most conservative metric, whereas the influenced open rate paints a broader picture of how push notifications shape behavior. 

What is the average push notification open rate?

Open rates vary by vertical, platform, and send strategy, so a flat industry average can be misleading. The right comparison is your industry’s performance against your platform’s — there’s no single benchmark that works across the board. Send volume shows a similar spread: in 2025, high-performing apps averaged roughly 179–188 pushes per user per month (178.9 Android, 187.8 iOS), while low- and medium-tier apps stayed under 10. Since open rates track closely with send frequency, benchmarking against your own tier and platform is what shows where you stand.

Push notification open rates by industry

No two industries should be judged by the same push notification rate. A retail app and a government alerts app are never going to land on the same benchmark, and that’s the point. 

To see how much push notification rates vary by industry, Airship analyzed over 681 billion push notifications sent to more than 3 billion users across 15 industry verticals for the 2026 Push Notification Benchmark Report, breaking results into the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles so brands can see exactly where they fall.

A few factors drive the gap between industries: 

• Nature of the content. Transactional notifications (an order shipped, a delivery is late) carry built-in relevance, so customers open them out of necessity. Promotional notifications have to earn the open.
• User expectation and intent at opt-in. Someone who opts in to flight delay alerts expects urgency. Someone who opts in to a retail newsletter expects the occasional discount.
• Notification frequency and fatigue risk. Verticals that send more often, such as media or gaming, run a higher risk of fatigue, which can quietly erode open rates over time.
• Personalization and segmentation maturity. Some industries are further along in tailoring send time and content to individual customers, and that maturity shows up directly in performance.

iOS vs. Android open rates: Is there a difference?

For years, comparing iOS and Android open rates wasn’t really a fair fight. Android enabled push notifications by default, while iOS required customers to actively opt in. 

With the universal adoption of Android 13+, the end or default opt-in was over, and now, brands have to actively earn permission to send push notifications to users on every platform, making iOS and Android push notifications a genuine choice versus a default setting.

What factors influence your push notification open rate?

Push notifications aren’t fixed. They respond to specific, controllable decisions you make every time you send, and most of the levers to influence a higher open rate are well within your control. 

Here’s what actually influences push notification rate performance: 

• Send time and time zone optimization: A push notification sent at the wrong moment gets ignored. Individual send times consistently outperform a blanket schedule.  

• Message copy and personalization: Generic copy reads as noise. Tie your messaging to customers’ specific interests or behavior. Relevant content earns the open. 

• Audience segmentation: Not every customer wants the same message. Segment your push notifications by behavior or lifecycle stage. 

• Notification frequency (tied to fatigue): Sending notifications too often erodes trust; the right cadence protects your long-term open rates, even if it means sending less. 
• A/B testing cadence: Open rates aren’t static. Regular test copy, timing, and creativity to keep your strategy aligned to what’s actually working. 

How to improve your push notification open rate

Most brands chase open rate improvements by sending more, but the brands winning at push notification marketing are leveraging zero-party data to provide a personalized experience for mobile users. Here are a few ways to use these insights to boost open rates:

• Start with your opt-in flow: A high-quality opt-in audience opens more than a large one. 

• Use behavioral-triggered over scheduled broadcasts: A notification tied to real customer action beats one sent on a fixed schedule. 
• Monitor unsubscribes alongside opens: A rising open rate can still mask a fatigued, shrinking audience. 

Ulta Beauty built a new framework to capture customer preferences the moment shoppers started browsing, using an Airship in-app survey to learn about eye color and beauty preferences. The retailer then used that data to retarget customers with tailored product recommendations, driving purchase conversion 2.8 times higher among those who saw the personalized experience than among those who didn’t.

The takeaway: The brands seeing the strongest results aren’t just segmenting by demographics. Instead, they’re building direct, ongoing feedback loops with their customers and using that data to make every message feel less like a broadcast and more like a conversation.

See how your open rate stacks up

Reading about push notification open rates is one thing. Knowing yours is another. The 2026 Push Notification Benchmark Report is the only resource with vertical- and platform-specific data at this scale, built from over 681 billion push notifications across 15 industries. Download the report to see how you compare.