The short answer
The median news app sends 9.7 push notifications per active day. A quarter of apps stay under 5.7, three quarters stay under 16.1, and only one app in ten sends more than 27.0. The loudest apps in the world send 40 to 60, every day, all year.
Those numbers come from counting, not from a survey. AO.news collects the push notifications of hundreds of news apps as they are delivered, and over twelve months they recorded 537,376 push notifications from 336 apps in 44 countries. This page is the answer to the question we get asked most about that dataset, and the question push editors ask themselves in every planning meeting: how many is normal?
Why "active day" matters
Any honest per-day figure has to pick a denominator. The median app in our data pushed on roughly two days in three; the median share of days with at least one push was 65.2%. Small apps skip weekends. Some push only when a story clears their bar, and that is an editorial choice, not a failure. So the same app has two truthful numbers. Counted only on days it pushes at all, the median app sends 9.7. Spread across every calendar day, silent ones included, the median falls to 2.2.
Use per-active-day when you are calibrating a push strategy, because it describes what a working day looks like. Use per-calendar-day when you are estimating annual volume or comparing against a metered wire. And when someone quotes a per-day number at you, ask which one it is. The gap between 2.2 and 9.7 is the whole argument.
The full distribution
Averages hide the shape, so here is the whole thing: the 99 apps that were live at least 180 days, bucketed by their median pushes per active day, with a familiar name or two in each bucket.
Apps by median pushes per active day. The median app sits in the highlighted bucket. Examples per bucket: under 2: eDagen (1.0), inkl news (1) · 2 to 5: ABC13 (4.0), Äripäev (4) · 5 to 10: 20 Minutes (9), Svenska Dagbladet (8.0) · 10 to 15: La Prensa (12.0), °m News (14.0) · 15 to 20: Sveriges Radio (17.0), SVT Nyheter (17) · 20 to 30: 20 Minuten (27.0), Göteborgs-Posten (22.5) · 30 to 45: B.T. (38), Dagbladet (43.0) · 45 or more: RaiNews.it (72), Breaking News (45.0).
The shape is the story. Most of the world's news apps cluster between five and fifteen pushes on a working day. The tail is short but extreme: a handful of apps push forty or more daily, and they are mostly aggregators and rolling-news brands whose product is the alert. If your newsroom sends 8 to 12 a day, you are not spamming anyone; you are the median. If you send 30, you are making a deliberate bet that your readers want a ticker on their lock screen.
Country changes everything
The biggest predictor of push volume is not audience size or editorial ambition. It is the country the newsroom operates in. The median app in each country, per day worked, for countries with at least five apps in the dataset:
Each bar is the median app in that country, so one hyperactive newsroom cannot speak for the rest. The same chart with full context is in the annual report.
Nordic newsrooms sit at the loud end of this table, and their audiences appear to tolerate it as the price of being first. So national norms, not platform guidelines, set the ceiling. A frequency that reads as aggressive in Washington is unremarkable in Copenhagen. Before benchmarking your own app, look at your market: the per-country pages under best time to send show when your competitors push, and the source pages show exactly how much, app by app.
The loudest apps
The top of the table, for scale. RaiNews.it sent 21,782 notifications in twelve months, which is 73.6 on each of the 296 days it pushed at all. For comparison, Project Push, the one-phone archive Nieman Lab covered in 2025, clocked CNN Indonesia at roughly 46 a day. Same league.
| # | App | Country | Pushes / year | Per day worked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | RaiNews.it |  Italy | 21,782 | 73.6 |
| 2 | Mathrubhumi |  India | 6,590 | 67.2 |
| 3 | Sveriges Radio Play |  Sweden | 14,093 | 64.1 |
| 4 | Breaking News |  United States | 17,763 | 48.7 |
| 5 | Dagbladet |  Norway | 10,211 | 42.5 |
| 6 | Gazet van Antwerpen - Nieuws |  Belgium | 4,046 | 39.7 |
| 7 | B.T. |  Denmark | 13,930 | 38.2 |
| 8 | Nau |  Switzerland | 3,899 | 36.4 |
| 9 | Iltalehti |  Finland | 5,902 | 34.3 |
| 10 | SUR |  Spain | 3,331 | 31.7 |
Per day here divides each app's total by the days it actually pushed, not by the calendar, so an app that joined mid-year is not counted as silent beforehand. Apps that pushed on fewer than 90 days are left out. Every app in the dataset has its own stats page.
Method
Counted: 537,376 push notifications sent by 336 news apps, 1 Aug 2025 to 31 Jul 2026, collected as they were delivered, with front-page headline robots excluded. Distribution figures use the 99 apps live on at least 180 days, so mid-year arrivals do not drag the medians down. An "app" is one installed news app; a publisher with several apps counts several times. Per-source figures refresh monthly on the source pages; this article describes the frozen twelve-month dataset, whose full numbers live in a year of push notifications.