Push notifications — those pesky alerts from the apps on your smartphone — tread a fine line between being useful and annoying. Facebook wants to tip the scales toward the former.

Third-party app developers can now access A/B testing services for push notifications within Parse, the back-end developer platform Facebook acquired last year. The new tool will let app developers test different push messages among a specific segment of their users, like only people in Chicago with iPhones. The developer can then see which version of the message had more people opening the app, or which led to more interactions inside the app, before pushing it out to everyone. It’s meant to be a better way of seeing how push notifications might resonate with users, rather than comparing different messages on different days, which can confound the results.

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