Limit of characters that can be sent through a push notification

Question:

What is the number of characters I can put in a push notification? How many characters are actually displayed?

Answer:

Payload limit. Pushwoosh itself does not limit the number of characters in a push. The hard limit comes from the gateways: both APNs (iOS/macOS) and FCM (Android) accept a maximum payload of 4096 bytes (4 KB). Note that this is the size of the whole JSON payload - title, body, custom data, deep link, rich-media reference and so on all count towards it, and non-Latin characters take more than one byte each.

Displayed characters. How much of the text a user actually sees is decided by the OS and, on Android, by the device manufacturer's launcher/skin. Treat the numbers below as rough guidance measured on stock Android, not as guarantees:

• Android (stock/vanilla)
  • Collapsed notification: body ~43 characters (1 line), title ~39 characters (1 line);
  • Expanded notification: body up to ~500 characters (about 10 lines), title ~79 characters (2 lines);
  • Notification with a banner image: body ~96 characters (2 lines), title ~79 characters (2 lines).
• iOS - roughly 4 lines (~178 characters) in the collapsed banner. Long-pressing the notification (Haptic Touch) expands it, and the full text can be scrolled.

The exact number of lines depends on the OS version, the display size and the launcher used by the device manufacturer (Samsung One UI, Xiaomi HyperOS/MIUI, HUAWEI EMUI, ColorOS, OxygenOS and so on), so always test your wording on real target devices.

Practical advice: keep the title under ~40 characters and the body under ~120 characters so the message reads well collapsed on both platforms, and put anything longer into the expanded text or an in-app message.