50+ Push Notification Statistics for 2026

Push notifications are one of the most direct ways a brand can reach its customers. They land on the lock screen, come from an app the customer chose to install and cost nothing to send.

That makes push one of the most valuable channels for retention and repeat sales, and one where it pays to know what good looks like.

This page brings together 50+ push notification statistics, covering everything from opt-in rates by platform and industry to open and click-through rates, how often brands send, what rich media and personalization add, the revenue push drives and how it compares with email, SMS and web push.

Push Notification Opt-In Rates

The best retail apps get about two in three of their users to allow push notifications. Airship’s benchmarks, based on 2025 data from thousands of apps, put the top 10% of retail apps at 63.93% on iPhone and 69.85% on Android, and the median at 43.5% and 49.95%.

Your opt-in rate sets the ceiling for every campaign and cart reminder you send, so it’s the first number to know.

Which Industries Get the Highest Opt-In Rates?

Opt-in rates differ by category, from about 39% to 61% on iPhone in Airship’s 2025 data. Within retail, the gap between the best and worst apps is about twice that, which means how you ask matters more than what you sell.

In retail, the top 10% of apps reached 63.93% on iPhone and 69.85% on Android, while the bottom 10% reached 18.1% and 25.2%.

Airship also found that apps running onboarding campaigns lifted their opt-in rates as much as 40% above their category’s average. That makes an onboarding flow one of the easiest wins for a retail app.

What’s the Opt-In Rate on iOS vs Android?

Android apps still get more opt-ins than iPhone apps, but the gap between iPhone and Android has narrowed. Across all apps, Airship’s median was 48.85% on iPhone and 53.3% on Android in 2025, with Android down from 59.5% a year earlier.

Batch’s 2025 benchmark, covering 10,000 apps and websites, found the same trend. Its average Android opt-in rate fell from 85% to 67% in a year, which Batch links to Android 13 making apps ask for permission the way iPhone apps always have.

Each platform measures its own customers’ apps, so the figures differ. Read them as a range. On iPhone, fewer than half of a typical retail app’s users opt in.

Give them a good reason and a clear incentive to say yes, and there’s significant upside. Ask at the right moment, explain what they’ll get and raise your opt-in rate before you worry about anything else.

Average Push Notification Open Rate

The typical app gets a push notification open rate of about 3%, counting only taps that open the app. Airship’s median across all industries was 2.68% on iPhone and 3.15% on Android in 2025, and Customer.io puts the average at around 4% in its own platform data.

The top 10% of retail apps reached direct open rates of 5.63% on iPhone and 8.38% on Android, against a retail median of 1.73% and 2.7%.

Opens are slipping on iPhone. Airship’s median iOS direct open rate fell 13.71% from 2024 to 2025, while Android’s dipped from 3.4% to 3.15%.

Android’s lead comes from how each lock screen behaves, according to Airship. On iPhone, notifications disappear from the lock screen as soon as the phone is unlocked.

Why Do Push Open Rates Vary So Much?

Push open rates range from under 2% to over 40% across published sources. These numbers are so different from source to source, because what constitutes an “open” for a push notification is far from standard.

Some measure it as an app open; the percentage of recipients who tap on the notification and open the app. Others, however, treat it more like an email open, when a user opens/views the entire message, perhaps without tapping through to the app.

There’ll also be a big gap when it comes to the type of notification. Some notifications require action: “We need confirmation of your account details, tap here.”

Others explicitly don’t: “Your order will be delivered today!”

So the type of notifications getting sent can skew the open rate massively.

On top of that, when you’re comparing email and push open rates, for example, you’re comparing two different things. A push “open” is really a click-through.

So if you have a 30% open rate for email and a 5% open rate for push, it can be a bit misleading. You’ll want to compare CTRs instead - doing this, you’ll likely find your push stats look a lot more impressive.

What’s a Good Push Notification Click-Through Rate?

A good push notification click-through rate for an ecommerce app is above 3.05% on iOS and 3.78% on Android. Those were the averages Pushwoosh measured for ecommerce and retail apps from late 2024 to mid-2025, across more than 600 apps.

Ecommerce apps get some of the best click-through rates of any category, about 1.8 times the all-industry average on iOS.

Pushwoosh counts a click as a tap and divides by the number of people who received the push, leaving out silent and transactional messages. Its figures aren’t directly comparable with Airship’s open rates.

Apps whose customers want every alert can do far better than the averages listed above.

How Often Should You Send Push Notifications?

Most shopping apps send push notifications a few times a week. In our research, the typical app sent 4.5 a week, and about a quarter sent one a day or more.

Those were popular brands, picked to see how successful brands use push. It’s also, crucially, leaving out brands that have an app but don’t send push at all. Across every retail app on its platform, Airship’s 2025 median was lower: 9.6 notifications per user a month on iPhone and 8.6 on Android. The busiest 10% sent 31.8 and 28.3.

Sending more can pay off. Apps in the top 10% for pushes per user had 72% more sessions per active user than their category’s average in Airship’s data.

So as long as your notifications give customers something of value, you shouldn’t be scared of sending regular push campaigns.

What Types of Notifications Do Shopping Apps Send?

More than two-thirds of the push notifications in our research were about products: new arrivals, picks and sales.

Cart and win-back messages only go to shoppers who leave something behind or drift away, so they’re a small share of what any one customer sees.

How Many Push Notifications Is Too Many?

Too many messages is the top reason people opt out of a brand’s notifications. In Airship’s consumer research, published in 2022, receiving too many messages too often was the most common reason for opting out, at 51%, followed by information that wasn’t relevant, at 40%.

Not everyone goes that far. When an app sends too many notifications, 42% of users change its notification settings, 39% turn notifications off and 8% delete the app, according to a 2021 YouGov survey of US adults. Only 9% do nothing.

Three to six messages a week can be fine for most ecommerce brands, plus automated messages such as cart reminders. Add more while you watch your opt-out rate and revenue per send to find your own best frequency.

Do Rich Media and Personalization Improve Push Results?

Rich media and personalization both lift push results, and messages built on what customers do or tell you lift them most. Airship’s 2026 benchmarks report these average lifts in direct open rates:

Airship sets that 37% apart from simply adding a first name. The lift comes from using what a customer recently did in your app, where they are or where they’ve reached in their journey with you.

Triggered messages show the same pattern. Contextual campaigns, sent automatically after something a customer does, averaged a 14.4% open rate in Batch’s 2025 benchmark of 800 billion messages, against 4.19% for generic ones.

Bo+Tee’s Black Friday push uses rich media and personalization together, with a full-size photo and a line about the styles the customer has been browsing. Kaged’s puts the product on sale front and center.

How Do Push Notifications Affect Retention and Revenue?

Push notifications keep customers coming back. App users who get at least one push notification in their first 90 days have about a third higher retention than those who get none, according to Airship’s 2023 benchmarks.

Customers who opt in also buy more often. In Airship’s 2026 benchmarks, health and beauty apps saw a 7% lift in purchase events on devices opted in to push. Opted-in entertainment customers bought 10% more often, and opted-in hospitality customers booked 4% more often.

Part of that gap comes from who opts in, since your most engaged customers are the most likely to say yes. That still makes every extra opt-in worth having.

Cart reminders are where push revenue is easiest to see.

Abandoned cart push alone brought in $10,000 to $200,000+ over a 30-day period for brands we studied (via our benchmark report).

These cart reminders from Dossier and JD Sports show how to do it right: they name what’s waiting and keep the tone light.

How Do Push Notifications Compare With Email and SMS?

Compared with email campaigns, push notifications get more clicks per message and cost nothing to send, while SMS gets the most clicks of all and costs money for every text. Each channel counts opens and clicks differently, so treat the figures as a guide rather than a like-for-like ranking.

Email open rates have been unreliable since September 2021, when Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection started loading tracking images in advance. SMS clicks need care too: Omnisend says an operating system update in late 2025 inflated SMS click counts, likely through bot activity.

Email, though not dead, can be impersonal, and emails are easy to miss or ignore. SMS is direct and personal, but rigid, and every text costs money.

Our comparison of push notifications vs SMS vs email covers cost, reach and the rules for each channel in more depth.

Web Push Notification Statistics

Web push, sent from a website through the browser, reaches far fewer people than app push. PushPushGo measured an average opt-in rate of 6% among unique site visitors in 2025, against about half of a retail app’s users.

Most web push subscribers are on phones. In PushPushGo’s 2025 data, 75% signed up from a phone’s browser, 20% on a desktop and 5% on a tablet.

Web push is best suited to desktop and Android visitors who haven’t installed your app. On iPhone, it only reaches people who’ve added your site to their Home Screen, on iOS 16.4 or later.

Automated web push gets nearly 10 times the clicks of broadcast campaigns, the same pattern Batch found for app push. Responses come fast, too: an average web push campaign gets about half its clicks within an hour.

Browsers are also cutting back on notifications nobody reads. In October 2025, Google announced that Chrome on Android and desktop would remove notification permission from sites that send many notifications with very little engagement, after finding that less than 1% of notifications get any interaction.

How to Send Native Push Notifications with MobiLoud

Every app benchmark on this page depends on one thing: an app on your customers’ phones. Building a custom native app is the expensive part. It usually takes months, a large budget and a team to keep the app in step with your website.

MobiLoud cuts that cost by building your native iOS and Android apps on top of the website you already have. Your customers get real apps from the App Store and Google Play, with native push notifications, native navigation and links that open the app.

• Push is built in to your app. Your app comes with OneSignal or Klaviyo set up, so you can segment, automate and personalize push from the first day.
• Welcome screens ask for permission at the right moment, which helps your opt-in rate.
• Your site carries over. Products, accounts and checkout work in the app, with no rebuild and no second codebase.
• We handle the app. We build, publish and maintain your app. Launch typically takes 2 to 4 weeks, with a one-time setup fee.

Final Thoughts

Push notifications may be the most effective marketing and communication channel available to brands today. They’re personal, direct and customizable, and they offer the least friction of any channel: one tap from the lock screen and a customer is back in your app.

The numbers point to three levers: get more of your app users to opt in, send messages triggered by what each customer does and send often enough to stay top of mind.

Any modern brand should be using push notifications, from new products and offers to order updates and cart reminders. Get those three levers right, and push becomes one of the cheapest and most dependable ways you have to bring customers back and grow repeat revenue.