Pugpig Knowledge Base

Setting up in-content Google ads for Archive

Published February 10th, 2025 by Harry Phillips

Pugpig Archive allows you to insert ads served by Google Ad Manager inside your content. This utilises Google Tag Manager to serve the GAM scripts, and insert the placements. Doing this requires a published GTM container to be live on your Archive. This is something you'll set up and manage, and then just send us the Container ID via a support ticke

Adobe Analytics on Bolt

Published February 27th, 2023 by Harry Phillips

This document guides you in helping us set up your Bolt app to track to your Adobe Analytics property What we need from you An environment file ID, you'll get this from Adobe Launch What the integration includes We'll track all of the events and parameters detailed in our analytics spec to the desired property, along with any further events or conte

The Future of Pugpig Publish

Published July 15th, 2024 by Harry Phillips

We're no longer able to submit updates to Publish apps on either iOS or Android. As these platforms make regular updates of their own (notably the upcoming releases of iOS 18 and Android 15), there is a substantial chance that in the near future the performance and functionality of Publish apps could become degraded or they could stop working entire

How we work with third parties

Published July 4th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

At Pugpig, we prioritise integrating with best-in-class third-party vendors to enhance the functionality of Pugpig Bolt. These integrations extend the capabilities of our platform by incorporating services such as Airship for push notifications and Facebook for conversion tracking. We've partnered with a wide range of vendors across our app portfoli

In-app purchases and cross entitlement

Published July 4th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

In-App Purchases are a wonderful, wonderful thing, and have in a few short years created a multi-billion dollar industry of their own. They’re convenient, they’re fast and, most of all, they stop you from having to type out your card details every time you want to buy something. That all said, we know that there are a number of situations in which I

App Store and Google Play Store Agreements

Published December 6th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

Warning Pugpig cannot accept the below mentioned agreements for you, and failure to do so will result in your app being removed stores Both Apple and Google require you to agree to certain policies in order for you to distribute your apps through the App Store and Play Store respectively. These include, but are not limited to, the Apple Developer Ag

Bolt Direct Timelines

Published April 30th, 2025 by Harry Phillips

What are Direct Timelines? This is feature is still under active investigation, so many things are subject to change, including the name. As Pugpig Bolt has grown into its role as the leading mobile platform. We’re adding a new, optional method for delivering your content to users in your Pugpig Bolt app. Called Direct Timelines, this allows you t

Data Consent & App Tracking Transparency

Published July 4th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

The ever-entwined concepts of tracking and user consent are always evolving, but recent years and months have seen sweeping changes that have substantially raised the bar in terms of what publishers and developers need to do. Any app submission now requires that you fully disclose what information is captured about your users, and how you intend to

Including a link to a PDF file within your edition ToC

Published November 28th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

Some of our customers like to give their users to the raw PDF files of their editions, in addition to the in-app reading experience Pugpig Bolt provides. To enable this, we've added the ability to link out from your edition timeline/table of contents to this file, which you'll need to upload to your Pugpig Express Site. This is an example of how it

Pugpig user agents

Published September 30th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

Use of User-Agent is deprecated User-agent sniffing is strongly discouraged. See "browser detection using the user agent" or many other similar pieces. It is also possible if not likely that the user-agent header will stop being sent at all by most software for privacy reasons in the medium term. For information only: Native mobile apps will use u

Block visibility on Pugpig Site

Published January 10th, 2023 by Harry Phillips

We want our customers to have flexibility over the access models of their site, easily enabling you to show prospective subscribers what you want, and then present a different experience to those you've converted. Pugpig Site can do this at the page/post level easily, allowing you to paywall your content while still allowing some of it to be accessi

Pugpig Accessibility Statement

Published February 3rd, 2023 by Harry Phillips

Pugpig is committed to ensuring digital accessibility for people of all abilities. We are continually improving the user experience for everyone, and applying the relevant accessibility standards. Measures to support accessibility Pugpig takes the following measures to ensure accessibility of the Pugpig Bolt and Site platforms: Include accessibility

Completing the Google Data Safety form for your Pugpig app

Published July 4th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

This article is for Google Play Console We also have a guide for the App Store Connect equivalent. Data safety is a new section you'll start seeing in the Google Play console when managing and submitting updates to your app. This comes with a couple of new requirements, which if not followed will prevent you from submitting these updates. Firstly,

The new tab bar on iPadOS 18: What you need to know

Published March 11th, 2025 by Harry Phillips

Pugpig Bolt uses platform-provided UI elements where relevant across the product. This has long been our approach and offers us many benefits, such as consistency across devices, reliability and stability, as well as familiarity for users. One such element is the tab bar, and iPadOS 18 has introduced changes to this, giving it a new design and reloc

GDPR-Compliance and consent for Google Ads in Pugpig Bolt

Published February 27th, 2024 by Harry Phillips

From January 16th 2024, Google Ad Manager began rolling out the requirement that implementation of a certified CMP (Consent Management Platform) is needed in order to serve ads in GDPR regions. This will affect any Google Ads served in Bolt, as described here. The exception to this is Limited Ads as described by Google. We are currently seeing a mi

Pugpig Glossary

Published June 30th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

This is a auto-generated Article of all your definitions within the glossary. Glossary This is a auto-generated Article of all your definitions within the glossary. All A B C D E F G I J L N P R S T X access based The entitlement model in which an active subscriber has access to all content, but loses the access when their subscription lapses (for e

Google Ad Manager and Pugpig Bolt

Published August 21st, 2022 by Harry Phillips

Overview This article details Pugpig Bolt's advertising capabilities, as well as a slightly more detailed explainer about how it can fit in with a more elaborate ad serving flow. Out of the box, Pugpig Bolt supports Google Ad Manager, though other providers may be served via Google Ads. These ad capabilities rely on our Express CMS, and apps that do

Viafoura SDK in Pugpig Bolt

Published August 6th, 2024 by Harry Phillips

Pugpig Bolt supports commenting with Viafoura in two ways, inline in the content view or in a modal provided by the native Viafoura SDK which can be accessed from several places in the app. While inline comments offer a more traditional experience, presented at the bottom of the article, the SDK offers enhanced functionality. This includes: A centra

Mixpanel and Pugpig Bolt

Published April 3rd, 2023 by Harry Phillips

What is Mixpanel? Mixpanel is a best-in-class product analytics tool with a specific focus on understanding user behaviour. It provides excellent visualisation of data to ensure it's easy to see how users are interacting with your app. How does Pugpig Bolt integrate with Mixpanel? At Pugpig we use third parties to inform our understanding of our sof

Pugpig Bolt Supported Operating Systems

Published January 13th, 2023 by Harry Phillips

We maintain support over several versions of the OSs Bolt runs on, this is to ensure your properties are available to as many of your users as possible. From time to time, we revise our list of supported OS versions to reflect the declining usage of those platforms and the increased effort of maintaining our product standards on older technology. He

Google Play app discoverability policy changes

Published January 30th, 2023 by Harry Phillips

The Google Play Store, which is where most customers install your Android apps from, recently made a policy change regarding older versions of apps. This is explained in detail in Google's documentation available here, but is summarised by the below paragraph "If your existing app’s target is below API 30, it will stop being discoverable to all Goog

Sending custom analytics from your content

Published September 5th, 2024 by Harry Phillips

Pugpig Bolt features robust tracking capabilities out-of-the-box, these have been designed to help you easily understand the usage of your app. This includes popular content, commercial performance and a broad range of engagement metrics. Our analytics spec details this. However, if your content or timeline cards feature custom functionality that is

Pugpig Publish Supported Operating Systems

Published January 13th, 2023 by Harry Phillips

Publish is no longer being actively developed All Pugpig apps will be updated to Bolt which provides everything Publish provided, and much, much more. We are no longer able to submit updates to Publish apps on iOS or Android. The information below reflects versions that Publish was lasted tested against. As Publish is now deprecated, and these OS ve

Pugpig, GDPR, and you

Published July 4th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

The EU's Government Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is enforceable as of the 25th of May 2018. Here's what you need to about how our products and services interact with your data. Should you want to know more about GDPR, what it is and why it’s being introduced, here's a useful GDPR summary . The good news is that most of you shouldn’t need to do

Webview tabs

Published June 7th, 2024 by Harry Phillips

Pugpig Bolt iOS and Android now (as of Bolt 4.1) offer two kinds of webview tab: Managed and Unmanaged. These two tab types serve different purposes depending on the kind of experience you want to give your users and the type of content you want to display. Managed Webviews are good for a single page experience - e.g. a video player, custom search -

Airship Preference Center on Bolt

Published March 16th, 2023 by Harry Phillips

The Preference Center* is an optional feature of Airship, one of Pugpig Bolt's supported integrations. It enables users to choose topics they want to receive notifications for, which can then be used as targeting segments within the Airship dashboard. The screen consists of a series of toggles, which can be broken into distinct sections, with option

Alternative purchasing mechanisms for Bolt apps

Published July 4th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

Apple now supports the addition of the External Link account Entitlement (ELE) as an option for “reader” apps. Reader apps are defined as “apps that provide one or more of the following digital content types — magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, or video — as the primary functionality of the app.” We expect that most Pugpig apps would

A new design for the Bolt subscription screen

Published September 17th, 2024 by Harry Phillips

For many Bolt customers in-app purchases are a critically important part of their app's commercial strategy. This means that the experience for users looking to purchase a subscription needs to be a beautiful, seamless journey. We've been collating the feedback we've received from customers and users, alongside our internal data, and are making som

Bolt Android 4.0

Published August 14th, 2024 by Harry Phillips

Bolt Android 4.0 features some significant under-the-hood changes aimed at bringing it in line with the latest Android technologies, guidance and best practices. This document explains what those are, given that while they may not be immediately apparent, they are notable in their improvements. Firstly, 4.0 targets API level 34 (Android 14), this is

Content backups

Published September 6th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

At Pugpig, we ensure that everything is regularly backed up using AWS Backup. This includes our internal systems, as well as customer data for Express, Pro and Site customers. Customer data can be split into two categories: 1. Editorial Content - this is stored in a database on Amazon Relational Database Storage (RDS)2. Edition Assets - these are st

Push Notifications in Bolt

Published January 11th, 2023 by Harry Phillips

What they are and why use them Push Notifications are a tool commonly used by apps of all kinds to alert users to something. In the case of publishers, the core case is to draw attention to content that's been published, thus drawing the user into the app. Breaking news is the most common use case for this, but it can be just as effective for exclus

OneSignal and Pugpig Bolt

Published September 27th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

What is OneSignal? OneSignal is a push notification and in-app messaging provider supported on Bolt iOS and Android. It's also a supported provider for our preference centre. The specific features supported in Bolt are: Push notifications, including rich push Deeplinking In-app messages Confirmed Deliveries External User ID (for logged in users) Cur

Google User Messaging Platform (UMP) and Pugpig Bolt

Published April 3rd, 2024 by Harry Phillips

What is Google User Messaging Platform (UMP)? UMP is Google's out-of-the-box consent management platform (CMP) designed to go hand in hand with Google Ad Manager. UMP is supported on Bolt iOS and Android from version 3.23 and beyond, Bolt Web support will be added in the coming months. Bolt supports the following UMP features. Displaying the consent

Pugpig Site Supported operating Systems

Published January 13th, 2023 by Harry Phillips

We maintain support over several versions of the OSs our products run on, this is to ensure your properties are available to as many of your users as possible. From time to time, we revise our list of supported OS versions to reflect the declining usage of those platforms and the increased effort of maintaining our product standards on older technol

Access to Google Search Console

Published July 4th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

This applies clients who have Pugpig Site. Google Search Console, previously known as Webmaster Tools, is a tool that allows us to check the indexing and ranking status of a website on Google. Put simply, it helps us see how Google views your site. Additionally, it offers an easy place to view your Core Web Vitals performance; included in the Googl

Auto Login Specification for Pugpig Bolt Web Reader

Published February 6th, 2023 by Harry Phillips

Bolt Web supports the ability to automatically sign users in if they're already signed in to another specified website. A key use case for this is customers using Bolt Web as their solution for edition reading, while the rest of their content or experience is hosted elsewhere. This doc details how this needs to be set up across both Bolt Web and the

Returning to the app

Published July 4th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

Bolt has relatively simple behaviour to determine what happens when a user returns to the app after it's been in the background. 1. Bolt will always try to return the user to exactly where they were when they closed it, including context such as the navigational stack. This is true regardless of how long the app has been in the background. 2. This

App Store Review prompts

Published November 1st, 2022 by Harry Phillips

iOS Apple allows apps to present a prompt encouraging users to rate and review the app. These both appear prominently in the App Store listing and can play a big part in users discovering and installing your app, which is why we've built this functionality right into Bolt. This is a system-provided prompt, meaning we don't have any control over its

Pugpig Bolt DUTA Model

Published July 4th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

Custom Analytics, User data, Tags and Attributes When a user authenticates, the verify response returns multiple pieces of information specific to that user, in addition to the actual authentication status. These can be broken down into 4 categories Analytics D imensions U ser data T ags A ttributes The goals of standardising this model are Ensure

Google analytics, sunsets and Pugpig: What you need to know

Published February 27th, 2023 by Harry Phillips

Google Analytics have for some time been communicating the forthcoming sunsetting of Universal Analytics and its replacement with GA4. This will occur on 1st July 2023. Many of you having been using Universal Analytics for years as a key part of your reporting. You can read much more about this from Google's perspective in their documentation. This

Bolt Download and Offline Behaviour

Published July 4th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

Pugpig Bolt aims to strike a balance between ensuring content is available whenever a user wants to read it, and respecting the limitations of data usage and storage space. This document details: What content a user should have available offline When this content is fetched How you can manually make your user’s apps fetch content What content a use

Google Tag Manager SDK and Pugpig Bolt

Published October 24th, 2023 by Harry Phillips

Google Tag Manager offers an SDK which can optionally be included in your Bolt App. While this is managed through the same dashboard as Google Tag Manager on a website, the functionality is substantially more limited and in Bolt apps can only be used for transforming events being tracked to Firebase. Specifically, the GTM SDK allows you to: Change e

Video in Pugpig Bolt

Published September 30th, 2024 by Harry Phillips

Videos are a key pillar in many of our customers' content offerings, and Pugpig Bolt has a broad range of tools to help you leverage this. This document explains how video in Bolt works, what options you have and what functionality you'll have access to. It's important to start with the fact that Bolt supports a number of different video players, th

The Pugpig roadmap, and why you can't see (all of) it

Published October 25th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

Like most product companies, our roadmap is central to how we think and talk about our work. It's how we decide what gets done, when it gets done and why we're doing it. Naturally, we get asked a lot of questions by our customers about what this roadmap looks like, and when they can expect to see features and changes they're looking forward to. The

Accessibility in Pugpig Bolt

Published July 4th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

We strongly believe that nothing should get in the way of your users reading your content, so we've worked hard to make your content work on different platforms and devices, and make it available when you've got no connection. This extends to making our apps usable for everyone, including people with disabilities. Apple and Android offer a veritable

Google Play Billing Library updates for Pugpig Bolt

Published October 7th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

The Google Play Billing Library is an optional part of an Android app that handles in-app purchases. This allows you to sell subscriptions or single issue purchases and deal with things like billing the right card, messaging users about expired cards, pausing subscriptions and so forth. Google release sporadic updates to this library, and these upda

Pugpig Products Supported Operating Systems

Published July 4th, 2022 by Harry Phillips

We maintain support over several versions of the OSs our products run on, this is to ensure your properties are available to as many of your users as possible. From time to time, we revise our list of supported OS versions to reflect the declining usage of those platforms and the increased effort of maintaining our product standards on older technol