1. Home
  2. Guides
  3. Getting Started
  4. What is Airship?

What is Airship?

Airship is the customer experience platform that connects every channel into journeys that adapt to each user.

View as Markdown

Engage your customers across the channels they use every day. Airship ties together who your customers are, what they do, and how you reach them, so a string of disconnected sends becomes one experience that moves each user toward your goals.

Start from first-party data you own, reach customers in the moments that matter, and trigger journeys from real behavior. Every result flows back into reporting so you can see what worked and how to improve.

What you can do with Airship

Build your audience, reach them on the channels and moments that matter, and use performance data to determine what to do next:

  • Audience & Segmentation — Reach the right users with segments built from customer attributes, behavior, and engagement signals.
  • Messaging — Send across every channel they use, with journeys that adapt to what they do.
  • Mobile wallet — Deliver passes like loyalty cards, offers, and tickets to Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, and update them in real time.
  • Personalization — Tailor the content of each message to the individual according to their attributes, behavior, and preferences.
  • Reports & Analytics and Experimentation — Learn what happened and prove what works by testing and measuring real impact.

Airship also connects to the rest of your stack: stream events as they happen with Real-Time Data StreamingA service that delivers user-level events in real time to your backend or third-party systems using the Data Streaming API. and plug into prebuilt partner integrations.

How it comes together

Combine Airship’s capabilities to build coordinated journeys that follow the customer across channels and adapt in real time to what they do.

Here’s a day in the life of a coffee brand’s customer:

  1. A morning push reminds them their favorite latte is half-price today. Tapping it opens the app.
  2. Inside the app, they tap through a SceneA mobile app or web experience of one or more screens displayed with fully native UI components in real time, providing immediate, contextual responses to user behaviors. Scenes can be presented in full-screen, modal, or embedded format using the default swipe/click mode or as a Story. They can also contain survey questions. to reorder their usual.
  3. On the walk over to pick up their drink, a Live ActivityDisplays current data from your app on the iPhone Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island. or Live UpdateDisplays current data from your Android app in a push notification, home screen widget, or custom app view. tracks the order on the lock screen.
  4. An email confirms the order and invites them to rate it.
  5. In the afternoon, an SMS offers a discount on a cold brew to bring them back.
  6. Later, a wallet pass delivers a loyalty reward to redeem on their next visit.

Every step draws on the customer’s attributes and behavior, so the journey responds in real time rather than following a fixed script. And because the customer picks their topics in a Preference CenterA page where users can manage their opt-in statuses for the Subscription Lists in your project. Preference Centers are presented within your app or website or as an Airship-hosted web page., like seasonal drinks, loyalty offers, or store openings.

What sets Airship apart

These capabilities are built into Airship, not bolted on through third-party tools, add-ons, or separate vendors:

  • Scenes — Build native, multi-screen experiences in your app or on the web, like surveys, onboarding flows, and story-style content.
  • Mobile wallet — Create and update Apple Wallet and Google Wallet passes directly from Airship, no PassKit setup or third-party pass platform required.
  • Feature flags — Gate features behind any audience segment for staged rollouts and A/B tests.
  • Live Activities and Live Updates — Push real-time updates that stay visible on iOS and Android lock screens, like order tracking, sports scores, and delivery ETAs.
  • Real-Time Data Streaming — Stream every engagement event to your data warehouse the moment it happens, not in nightly batches.

How you use Airship

You work with Airship through three components:

  • The dashboard is where you set up projects, create messages, manage audiences, and view reports. Marketers and operations teams spend most of their time here.
  • The SDKs connect Airship to your mobile app or website. They register channels, deliver content, and report engagement back to the platform. See Mobile and Web SDKs.
  • Use the REST APIs to drive Airship from any code you write. Register channels, send messages, manage audiences, and integrate Airship with your existing systems. See REST APIs.

For teams building with AI coding assistants, the Airship MCP server and Skills extend your assistant with authenticated, real-time access to your project’s APIs, Airship documentation, and structured playbooks for everything from writing integration code to validating it. See Airship AI tools.

Where to go next

Choose the path that matches what you want to do:

For help along the way, visit support.airship.com .