Apps in IOS generally show a badge counter telling how many unread notifications are pending for that app. My understanding is that, to update the badge counter, increment or decrement, we need to send a push notification with the current counter value.
I was testing the behaviour of Gmail app, and even if I mark a message as read on my laptop's browser, the counter on App on IOS got decremented to represent the correct value, without receiving any push notification. I had killed the app on IOS before testing it.
I am wondering how Gmail does that. Can silent push notifications, let us update the app badge counter without showing notification alert? Do silent push notifications work at all, when the app is in killed state?
You can update your app's badge count by sending the new count from the server. For example by sending:
{
“aps” : {
“badge” : 9
}
}
As the payload you would set the badge to 9.
For more on the APNS payload, you can check the docs
On iOS it doesn't matter if the app is killed or not to receive a push notification (btw, that's why they are push notifications). In order to update the badge number, you can send the Background Notification (silent notification), which wakes your app so that your app can update, fetch new content.
Read the Docs
Related
I have a messaging app, in the past I was using push-kit to wake up my app in order to download message in background or when app killed.
As Pushkit I can not use any more, so I must use remote notification, but if I add in the payload of remote notification content-type =1 and doesn’t add any badge or alert Apple called this as a silent notification so according to them, if app receive more than 5 silent push in hour they can throttle the notification.
My question is, if add badge and alert and content-type =1 in payload in order to wake up my app and download the message, can app receive more than 5 notification in hour and Apple will not throttle this?
I am going to answer here maybe it can help someone else.
As i asked from apple, they says that if you add
content-type =1
in remote notification, it looks like background notification for them or silent notification what ever you call... there is a limit of 3 silent notification per hour and also not guaranteed the delivery...
Note: In debug there is no limitation, if you want to test it, you should test it from testflight.
I have an application which receives Push Notification and these notifications are delivered properly to the device. However when these notifications are delivered badge does not count. I have read online that one sends badge number with the payload which I understand but does not work for my case. Notifications are delivered based on different instances and I want to be a able to increase the badge number based on the available notifications the user has not opened his device to view.
With payload, there is no way to know if a user viewed the notification already and zero it. I am trying to avoid setting a badge in the payload to maybe 7 whereas the unopened notification on the device is one.
Since push notification are handled by iOS and not by ios app you can't change the application badge on receiving a push notification.
Though you can send the badge number in the payload of the push notification as you already send, so you have to do the calculation on server side.
Go through Local and Push Notification Programming Guide and especially the The Notification Payload.
Apple doc says that if there are multiple notifications to be delivered then only the last notification will be delivered to the phone because the Queue size is 1. So If my app goes offline and there are like 40 notifications to be delivered, when my app comes online I only get one notification instead of all 40.
I have tested this with WhatsApp and it gets all the notifications even though the app is killed.
How can I ensure I receive all the notifications as well?
Here's what docs state:
The priority of the notification. Specify one of the following values:
10–Send the push message immediately. Notifications with this priority
must trigger an alert, sound, or badge on the target device. It is an
error to use this priority for a push notification that contains only
the content-available key.
5—Send the push message at a time that takes into account power
considerations for the device. Notifications with this priority might
be grouped and delivered in bursts. They are throttled, and in some
cases are not delivered.
And about VoIP:
Instead of persistent connections, developers should use the PushKit
framework—APIs that allows an app to receive pushes (notifications
when data is available) from a remote server. Whenever a push is
received, the app is called to action. For example, a VoIP app could
display an alert when a call is received, and provide an option to
accept or reject the call. It could even begin taking precursory steps
to initiate the call, in the event the user decides to accept.
Do I understand correctly that apns-priority defines message queuing at APNS side, and VoIP push type defines what happens on the device?
And what do they mean saying
It is an error to use this priority for a push notification that contains only the content-available key.
Will APNS return an error or is it just a bad practice?
P.S. I use AWS SNS for sending notifications and it does not support customisation of apns-priority, but I am curious how it affects the process.
The main difference is that even if your app is closed voip notification can wake your app for kill/suspended state and user notification just shows an alert without waking up your app for more refer.
Apple documentation for pushkit
The main difference is that VoIP notification will launch your app if it's not running or was killed from app switcher and you need to handle the notification in your code, while the normal notification will be shown immediately as local notification and will not start your app.
I have an iOS app that needs to update its content while running in foreground automatically. My app does NOT need to update if in background.
There is a existing way to do so, which is APNS(Apple Push Notification Service).
Because I don't want users to see notification message while in background, using push notification without alert or message might be a solution.
However, if using APNS, iOS would ask users to confirm if they want to receive notifications by my app. I think that users may be confused when being asked by the OS since my app does not actually push notification to users.
The current method I use is keep pulling my API every 30 seconds to see if new content is available. This method would fail if there are too many users.
Is there any 3rd party push-notification-like service that provides notification while app runs in foreground only? (no need to get notification while in background)
You can use Silent notification for that, in this
In the WWDC 2013's "What's New with Multitasking" presentation, there is a section about Silent Push Notifications. if you send the APS payload with just the content-available set to 1, users will not be notified of the notification.
And the notification arrives in application:didReceiveRemoteNotification:fetchCompletionHandler:
Your payload is like
{
aps: {
content-available: 1,
sound: "default"
}
}
In case of push notification, it is necessary for user to accept push notification on application 1st run. You can set a silent push notification also and for this user will not get any alert of getting a notification during application run loop.
If you want to avoid push notification, then you can only set a NSTimer that you are doing already.
There can be a 3rd case, Application only sync with the server when it comes to foreground. And for this you can refer to my this post.