Did your mobile growth strategy survive the pressures of 2025?

This past year, mobile strategies were put to the ultimate test. From global conflicts to a frantically compressed 28-day holiday shopping season, consumers instinctively reached for their smartphones — the remote control of their daily lives — for critical updates and services.

To orchestrate these moments, brands rely on push notifications more than any other channel. But to ensure your brand is actually keeping pace, you need to measure your performance against proven standards. For our 2026 Benchmarks Report, we analyzed over 681 billion push notifications sent to more than 3 billion users across 15 industry verticals to uncover exactly what is driving real results on mobile.

Below, we’ll walk you through the importance of push notification benchmarks (and provide a sneak peak into the report’s data).

Push notification benchmarks are standardized metrics, including average opt-in and open rates, used to evaluate and optimize the effectiveness of your mobile app engagement strategies. They offer a framework for understanding whether your campaign is performing above, below, or on par with industry averages.

Push notification benchmarks are critical for evaluating and optimizing your mobile app engagement strategies against industry standards. They provide a framework to measure success in and, therefore, optimize for key metrics such as opt-in and open rates.

Additionally, there are a few reasons to track push notification benchmarks:

1. They provide context: Without benchmarks, data exists in a vacuum. Benchmarks provide a lens to determine if your strategies are exceeding, falling short, or on par with industry standards.
2. They help you set data-driven goals: Instead of navigating in the dark, you can use benchmarks to set realistic, data-driven goals.
3. They allow you to drive real results: Many push notification benchmarks correlate to results that matter for your business, such as conversion rates.            

Measuring push notification performance starts with identifying and tracking key metrics, including the following:

• Opt-in rates: Monitors subscriber growth and churn.
• Direct open rates: Indicates your mobile strategy’s ability to drive immediate, high-intent app engagement.
• Average monthly push notifications per user: Balances active engagement against the very real risk of notification fatigue.

To optimize these metrics and improve performance, consider deploying the following:

• A/B testing: Compare changes in copy, images, and send time, and choose the best performing variant.

• Time optimization: Analyze user behavior, such as when they open your app, to determine the best send time.
• Segmentation: Categorize your users into groups based on preferences.

These benchmarks are an essential starting part to driving real results with your mobile app strategy. You’ll find benchmarks across fifteen industries, including:c

• Business: Apps driving professional engagement, B2B services, and corporate operational efficiency.
• Charities, foundations, and non-profits: Mobilizing supporters and driving vital donations through mission-critical, community-focused outreach.
• Education: Empowering students and educators with real-time learning updates, deadline reminders, and campus alerts.
• Entertainment: Captivating audiences with personalized content discovery, new release drops, and live event ticketing.
• Finance and insurance: Building consumer trust through secure, zero-latency transactional alerts and personalized account guidance.
• Food and drink: Satisfying cravings and driving foot traffic with hyper-local promotions, loyalty rewards, and live order tracking.
• Gambling and gaming: Keeping players locked in and engaged with high-stakes updates, live odds, and instant in-game rewards.
• Government: Delivering essential public services, civic updates, and critical, localized emergency alerts.
• Media: Breaking the news and capturing attention in a relentless, fast-paced global headline cycle.
• Medical, health, and fitness: Guiding users toward their wellness goals with secure appointment reminders and daily habit-tracking nudges.
• Retail: Turning window shoppers into loyal buyers through highly targeted flash sales, restock alerts, and cart abandonment messaging.
• Social: Connecting communities and driving constant peer-to-peer engagement through instant interaction updates.
• Sports and recreation: Fueling fanaticism with real-time score updates, breaking trades, and seamless game-day logistics.
• Travel and transportation: Smoothing the passenger journey with mission-critical itinerary changes, gate updates, and immediate rebooking alerts.
• Utility and productivity: Streamlining daily life with highly functional reminders, account management alerts, and core service updates.

All data features three percentiles: 90th, 50th, and 10th. If your metrics rank at or above the 90th percentile, you’re performing at the top of your industry. However, if you find yourself ranking beneath the 50th percentile, your push notifications are seeing below-average results, indicating room for improvement. In the report, we share several strategies you can deploy to improve your push notification performance.

For now, here’s a sneak peak at the data:

1. The opt-in convergence is complete

Historically, Android opt-in rates artificially inflated performance metrics because notifications were enabled by default, whereas iOS has always required explicit consent. Today, with the universal adoption of Android 13+, that gap has permanently closed, bringing Android and iOS opt-in rates to near parity. The era of the passive “default opt-in” is officially over. Across all operating systems, teams must actively earn a customer’s permission by mastering the value exchange.

2. The push volume middle ground is disappearing

When it comes to how many messages brands are sending, the market is splitting into two different camps: the aggressive top tier and the conservative majority. The apps that already send the most notifications (the 90th percentile) drastically increased their monthly output, doubling down and sending even more. Meanwhile, Android’s median and low-tier campaigns dropped their volume by 15% year-over-year. This proves the middle ground is disappearing. Brands must make a deliberate choice: either your app’s core value requires a high-frequency, continuous alert model, or it requires a highly conservative, strictly curated approach.

3. In transactional verticals, execution is everything

There’s a massive spread between the 10th and 90th percentiles, proving that a generic mobile strategy is a liability. In highly promotional or transactional spaces, the execution of your value exchange is especially make-or-break. For example, the Food and drink vertical sees massive performance gaps across both platforms — a 57.32 percentage point spread on Android and a 49.63 point spread on iOS. Competitors relying on outdated batch-and-blast tactics are actively alienating their audiences, leaving an opening for brands that use intelligent, orchestrated messaging to win and retain those opt-ins.

Ready to see how you stack up?

Of course, data without direction is just noise. Inside the full report, alongside the benchmarks, we’ve included practical, outcome-obsessed strategies you can deploy immediately.