A field instrument for push-notification behaviour, not a survey. It reads what apps
actually send, at the moment they send it.
What it does
Captures every push alert a set of news apps send to a real device, verbatim —
headline, body, timestamp, category.
Groups alerts about the same story across outlets and measures who pushed first
and by how many minutes.
Scores each alert's copy — does it give a reason to open, or just restate the
headline? — and tracks send-time cadence, volume, and promotional mix per outlet.
How it works
Device→Capture→Cluster→Recap
An instrumented Android device polls each app's notification state every 30 seconds.
New alerts are deduped and stored, then clustered by story with a text-similarity
pass so cross-outlet races can be timed. A nightly job turns the day's data into a
short recap — a statistical digest always, plus an LLM narrative when one is
configured.
What production adds
A fleet of devices per outlet instead of one, so results aren't one phone's
quirks — different regions, OS versions, and account states side by side.
Real-time capture and alerting instead of a nightly batch, so a first-mover race
or a promotional-copy spike surfaces within minutes.
Longer history, outlet-level trend lines, and a focus-outlet comparison mode for
a team tracking its own push program against the field.