So, I have about 1000 iOS users installed my app.
I tried to send push notification to these users thru my app's backend panel, however, my devices did not receive the push notification. I also asked some users, and some of them said they did receive the push notification and some did not.
I was wondering why not all of the 1000 iOS users receive the push notification successfully.
At first, I thought it has to do with my applications, because my device has the latest update that is yet to release to public. So I went on and delete all the device tokens I got, and register my device again to test the push notification.
This time, my device received the push notification from backend panel successfully. So, I am sure there is nothing wrong with the coding part on receiving push notifications. (I ran multiple test on this and sure that push are send and receive successfully)
It only happens when I tried to send bulk push notifications to iOS users.
so, is sending push notification has a limit? like it only allows to send may be to 100 users?
or may be there are invalid device token so that pushes are stopped before finish sending to all users? but in what situation device token become invalid? will uninstalled user's device token may be a cause?
In our experience notifications have far from a 100% delivery rate, and that's with only between 50 and a 100 installs across iOS. In theory there is no cap set in place.
The only limits I'm aware of is sending an identical notification to the same device multiple times within a short window of time.
Related
I wanted to know if it is possible to send a Push to App A and App B at the same time, and if the user has both apps installed, only one will be shown.
Edit:
I was trying to prevent duplicate Notifications to be shown if the user has both Apps installed. But it seems this is not possible to do on the App side. We will have to come up with something server side to prevent duplicate messages to be sent.
Each app has its own deviceToken on that device. To send pushes to both apps you would need to send the push to both device tokens. The device will display both notifications.
I am using push notification in an app. Everything is going fine.
Sometimes message sent from server but in app side it does not receive.
In this situation I have to know which message is missing to deliver(app did not receive).
Is there any way to know from server side which message is received by app and which are not?
Nopes, push notifications are fire-and-forget.
Apple will not tell you the following:
Will not tell whether the message was sent successfully or not
Will not tell if the user has opted out of Push Notifications
Many other things but anyways...
However
On the other hand, when the user has opted for Push Notifications then your app can handle this but to a certain extent:
Basically, you could add logic in the -didReceiveRemoteNotification: and -didFinishLaunchingWithOptions: to contact your server and tell your server that the message was received.
If it wasn't received within a particular time slot then you can resend it.
But as you see, this could lead to a possible scenario of flooding an innocent user with the same push notifications.
In a sense, harassing him to tap your stupid push notification, which in turn may lead him to switch off push notifications for your app entirely but mostly he would delete the app and maybe even give it a low rating?
Serves you right, I'll say.
Anyways, if you go ahead with this, you would need to implement an identification pattern where you insert a unique message identifier into the payload of the push notification and when your app gets this push notification, it should send this message identifier back to the server.
Your server should then log that a particular device token returned a message identifier, which means it received that particular push notification.
Your server can check on a hourly/daily/whateverly basis and resend a particular message to those device tokens that have not reported back with the relative message identifier.
Again, this means your server might need to work OT sometimes.
There are other issues with this whole approach:
User received push notification but dismisses it rather than opening your app with it
Your server will assume the user did not see the push notification and will send this push notification again
Ghost device tokens
User accepted push notifications at first but later revoked this privilege
User uninstalled the app
Basically, device tokens that once use to receive push notification but no longer do, most probably due to your message flooding reputation
User received push notification but taps it at a later time
might get same push notification multiple times (very irritating)
User received push notification but taps it when there is no internet connectivity
User received push notification but your server is down, possibly fried \m/
You can circumvent the last 3 scenarios by having even more logic in your app that queues the message id's that are to be sent to the server and removes it only when the server responds successfully.
So you see, too much work, server-side + client-side.
Plus it's a massive performance degrader on the server-side when dealing with a good volume of users as well as lowering the performance of your app by a wee bit.
The Feedback Service
The Apple Push Notification Service includes a feedback service to
give you information about failed push notifications. When a push
notification cannot be delivered because the intended app does not
exist on the device, the feedback service adds that device’s token to
its list. Push notifications that expire before being delivered are
not considered a failed delivery and don’t impact the feedback
service. By using this information to stop sending push notifications
that will fail to be delivered, you reduce unnecessary message
overhead and improve overall system performance.
Query the feedback service daily to get the list of device tokens. Use
the timestamp to verify that the device tokens haven’t been
reregistered since the feedback entry was generated. For each device
that has not been reregistered, stop sending notifications. APNs
monitors providers for their diligence in checking the feedback
service and refraining from sending push notifications to nonexistent
applications on devices.
1. If you are asking about notifications not delivered on a device which has application installed on the device and just because of notification getting expired before it is delivered or something else, notifications are not delivererd.
Then the answer is
Nope.
It does not provide support where in you can check if the Notifications is expired and not delivered on a valid device:
any option to know if apple app get the push notification?
Refer to Moshe's answer in above link. I am including his answer here so that it is useful to everyone in future even in case the link becomes dead.
The short answer, you can't, since APNS is one way. However, since an
app can execute arbitrary code upon receipt of a notification, you can
use this to say, send an http request to your own server when the
notification is recieved.
2. If you asking of the notifications not delivered as user has uninstalled the application then you can refer to meda's answer in this post.
Hope this helps you and let me know if you have any queries regarding my explanation.
You can get the the delivery report of Push notification, Not from server but from your app, using "Service Extension" and modifying little bit in your Push json. Checkout this link for detailed explanation.
We are currently implementing push notifications (for IOS only for now), and we are planning on using Urban Airship. We want to send a push message to a device if they have our app installed and push enabled, and send an SMS message if not. Our users pay for the notifications, so we want to make sure as much as possible that they always get either a push message or a SMS message. Sending the push messages itself works fine, but I am confused about how to keep track of who we can actually send push messages to.
As far as I know, the only way to really making sure if a user can receive push messages is to, before sending a push message, make an additional call to the urban airship api to check if the device exists and is active. I would prefer to not do 2 api calls for each push message, so an alternative could be to keep track of all registered devices in urban airship locally, and update that list once per hour or so. However, this would mean the 'active devices list' is not always completely accurate, and that we have to keep track of all registered devices ourselves, which feels like re-implementing a part of urban airship.
Is there any other (better) way to do this? As far as I can see, when I send a push message to urban airship the api always returns that it was sent succesfully, regardless of whether or not a device is active, or if it even exists.
I can't imagine that I am the only one with this problem. Does anyone have a better way of solving it, or am I stuck with the 2 options that I figured out myself?
Urban Airship shares the following two options:
In any case, applications should expect and handle inactive device
tokens properly. We recommend that developers either:
Register the device token every time the application is opened, like our sample app does
Use our feedback API regularly, store inactivated device tokens in your own database, and send registrations when the device token
becomes active again.
If you make an additional call to the Urban Airship to check if the device exists and is active, even then the 'active devices list' may not always be completely accurate because Urban Airship relies on periodic updates from Apple Feedback Service:
Apple tells us that the application has been uninstalled via the
feedback service, which we check on a regular basis.
Also, do remember what Apple has stated about the delivery of Push Notifications:
Important: Delivery of notifications is a “best effort”, not guaranteed. It is not intended to deliver data to your app, only to notify the user that there is new data available.
My app push notification pushing from C# Application using device token.
Once user uninstall app on device, I want to stop the push notification. Yeah of course it's working fine.
Again installed same app. But it is receiving previous user notification without login.
How to solve this problem?…
I have refereed this link http://42spikes.com/post/Sending-Apple-Push-Notifications-from-a-C-Application.aspx
My Question :
1) Is it possible to call any method while uninstalling/installing time? (possible means can I hit web services and reset device token value?).
2) Any Other idea to solve this problem while installing or uninstalling time?
No, there is no method fired when a user uninstalls your app.
Yes,
Apple has a service where you can check wether tokens are still
valid.
The option you want to implement in your C# Application is The Feedback Service:
The Apple Push Notification Service includes a feedback service to give you information about failed push notifications. When a push notification cannot be delivered because the intended app does not exist on the device, the feedback service adds that device’s token to its list. Push notifications that expire before being delivered are not considered a failed delivery and don’t impact the feedback service. By using this information to stop sending push notifications that will fail to be delivered, you reduce unnecessary message overhead and improve overall system performance.
Our app uses APNS to receive Push Notifications. However, our client claims that some of their devices were not receiving notifications and argues to they 'must' make sure the notifications to be delivered 100%. But I have read somewhere that APNS is not 100% reliable and there should be cases which the notifications are not delivered.
I'm currently panic at how we could make sure APNS to received anytime. I have read that a case which may APNS not delivered (device may offline). But our test showing that even the device is online (Wifi or 3G), sometimes APNS were not delivered.
Is there any specific case which may APNS will not delivered? Or is there anything we (developers) can do with codes to make sure to receive all notifications? What I have done in the code is just registering the app to remote notification and write didRegisterForRemoteNotificationsWithDeviceToken, then throw the device token to our server.
Any help would be appreciated, for our client almost kill us if ALL of their devices not receiving APNS!
APNS is based on Apple Servers, and Apple doesn't give any guarantee on successful message delivery.
If the app is open (i.e. the user is using the app) while the notification arrives, iOS doesn't show a notification message, you need to handle it.
Notification shows up only when the app is backgrounded or killed.
Also implement feedback service on your server side; will help you get rid of old unwanted tokens (users who deleted the app or disabled notifications through settings).
Don't send too many notifications to a device within a short span of time, because APNS caches only 1 message/device (if the device is offline). So it can deliver the message when the device comes online. Am not sure how long the message is cached though.
Or just implement Pusher... http://pusher.com
We're facing the same problem. As everybody said, APNS is a best effort service so you can't be sure every notification will be delivered, but what you can do is to be sure of which ones have been received. This is what we're about to do. We register in our backend each notification que ship and the mobile app reports back each notification it receives. Then we set a maximum time of waiting for a notification to be received, if we don't receive the report back we try again.
I hope it might be helpful to someone (even 2 years later)
It says it quite clearly in the Apple Docs that it is not 100% gauranteed and nor should it be used as so. Its sent with "best effort".
As per Apple's guidelines, APNS is not 100% reliable service which means your app may not get push notifications from Apple servers due to some of the following reasons:
Device is offline
Your app is in the foreground state, you need to manage the push notification.
Note: Apple rejects apps which make compulsion to use notification services. (I have faced it in one of my App)
For more information, you can look into this answer
https://stackoverflow.com/a/25830955/3278326