.. _airship_integration:

Airship
=======


Marketing and digital experience teams at thousands of the world's most admired companies 
rely on Airship's customer engagement platform to create deeper connections with customers 
by delivering incredibly relevant, orchestrated messages on any channel.

Airship can be used in conjunction with Apptimize to streamline product
releases, A/B tests, messaging and user lifecycle management, and to provide
retargeting and re-engagement.

This integration is available starting in the following SDK versions:

* **Android:** Apptimize SDK 3.5.0+ / Airship SDK 11.0.0+
* **iOS:** Apptimize SDK 3.2.0+ / Airship SDK 12.0.0+

Use Cases
^^^^^^^^^

With Airship and Apptimize together, you can leverage both platforms in
conjunction with one another to create powerful end-to-end experiences:

* Synchronize the in-app and CRM marketing experiences for a custom promotion.
* Test a new onboarding experience in Apptimize, and use Airship to nurture users
  throughout the new flow.
* Concurrently test product feature configurations alongside their appropriate
  user messaging.
* Tailor in-app experiences and their appropriate messaging for
  different segments of end users.
* Target users in experiments by using properties set in Airship. 


How It Works
^^^^^^^^^^^^

The Apptimize SDKs for iOS and Android come pre-packaged with the Coordinated Experimentation
integration between Apptimize and Airship. If both the Apptimize and Airship 
SDKs are installed in your app, and the integration is enabled, it will automatically create 
user-level tags in Airship based on the status of A/B Experiments 
and Feature Flags for that user.  More information on enabling integrations can be found in :ref:`Integrations <third_party_integrations>`.

In order to use properties set in Airship for named users, or to retrieve channel tags,
the Apptimize SDKs directly instantiate dedicated objects from the `Airship SDKs <https://docs.airship.com/reference/libraries/android/latest/reference/packages.html>`_
and invoke relevant methods.

Specifically, the Apptimize SDKs make use of the following methods from the
Airship SDKs for iOS and Android:

.. list-table::
   :header-rows: 1
   :widths: 30 70

   * - Method
     - Purpose
   * - `NamedUser.getId()` (Airship SDK v12-14) or `Contact.getNamedUserId()`
     - To get associated named user ID
   * - `AirshipChannel.getTags()`
     - To get channel tags

Integration Specifics
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The Coordinated Experimentation integration automatically creates and manages the following Airship tags:

========================================================= =======
`Enrolled_[ProjectType]_[ProjectName]_[VariantName]`      |created-enrolled|
`Participated_[ProjectType]_[ProjectName]_[VariantName]`  |created-participates|
========================================================= =======

These tags will all be contained within an Apptimize tag group labeled "ua_apptimize" 
on the Airship dashboard.

.. |created-enrolled| replace:: Created when a user is enrolled in an A/B Experiment variant (AB), Feature Flag (FF), Instant Update (IU), or Winning Variant (WV). Cleared when a user is unenrolled.
.. |created-participates| replace:: Created when a user participates in an A/B Experiment variant (AB) or Feature Flag (FF). Cleared when a user is unenrolled.