I'm working with AWS SNS API for mobile notification,
along with AWS CloudWatch for message monitoring.
There's currently only 5 metrics to be watched:
NumberOfMessagesPublished
PublishSize
NumberOfNotificationsDelivered
NumberOfNotificationsFailed
SMSSuccessRate
None of these seems to be like message content, recipient platforms, or delivered date/time. (contents that make more sense to marketers rather than developers)
How could I query the history of all my sent messages or a specific message?
SNS does not retain sent messages. You would have to archive the sent messages yourself as you send them.
One idea is to let SNS itself do the message archiving for you, so that you can then query the archive for the analytics that are relevant to you.
This can be done by subscribing a Kinesis Data Firehose to the SNS topic that you use for sending these mobile notifications. You can configure your Firehose stream to store the SNS notifications in S3, Redshift, Elasticsearch, Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, or MongoDB.
Check this out: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/01/amazon-sns-adds-support-for-message-archiving-and-analytics-via-kineses-data-firehose-subscriptions/
SNS is a wrapper around a number of similar notification APIs. The APIs for Apple (APNS) and Google (Most Android) GCN don't offer any kind of receipt confirmation.
If you need receipt confirmation you would have to build that into the application on the mobile device to inspect messages received that were for that application and there is no universal way to do that either. The other issue is that you are totally at the mercy of the user authorizing notifications.
I suggest you incorporate messaging of your own inside the app and have push notifications as an optional enhancement. In order to get badges to work right you also need cooperation with the app since there is no way using SNS to react to actions taken in the app to clear the notifications or adjust the badge value.
Related
How can I send specific notification to a particular user using AWS SNS service. I am able to configure the application and code at iOS part to receive the sns notification but through SNS console.
How can I send and receive the notifcation from iOS only for specific users? I am not able to find any helpful demonstration on it.
What I want is to send an automated push notification to users once a day, and have found a way to do this with automated notifications with OneSignal. The problem is that it asks for a title/message to input on their console, but what I wanted was to have a backend (haven't chosen yet, probably Firebase) with some strings, and each day a string will be randomly chosen and that will be automatically pushed to all of my users. Is there a way to do this with OneSignal, and if not with some other push notification service?
Can I accomplish this with the OneSignal API, or should I write some custom script and host it somewhere (like cron) that sends these using API calls?
thanks
I am developing an iOS messaging app that uses Twilio to send and receive SMS and MMS. The tutorial on Twilio about the iOS client seems to only cover outgoing and incoming calls. I understand that sending an SMS/MMS would mean that I send a HTTP request to my server, in which my server sends the request to Twilio in order to complete the sending. However, how would I receive messages on my app?
I know that Twilio numbers have web hooks that execute when the number receives this message, but how would I get this message to my app. I don't believe that there are delegate methods included like the voice ones. The only solution that I could think of right now would be to use push notifications from my server to the phone. Is there any other possible way? Thanks.
I was recently in a similar situation to yours, but my app only cares about receiving a response within a 2 minute window while the app is opened.
Regardless, I would say that your best options include 1) push notifications, 2) sockets (probably via Socket.io), or 3) background polling. If you plan to have your application receive the message agnostic of its state (open, closed, etc), then I would highly suggest using push notifications. I'm using Parse as my Twilio backend and it makes creating and working with push notifications a breeze :)
I am new to iOS development and started a tutorial on a simple messaging app using Parse as the server. The way they have it coded, the app queries parse every time a message is sent(to save the message) but seeing as Parse only allows 30 req/sec under its FREE plan how would one go about making a messaging app? Is it standard convention to save data to the server for each message? It just doesnt seem practical to have a substantial user base on an app that can only query the serve 30 times a second.
The question simplified is: what is the standard convention for the relationship with servers for a simple messaging apps? Does the app save each message to a server or is there a work around using push notifications? (But even with push notifications the app would have to be opened to receive them, at least thats from my limited understanding of pushes)
It is not practical to have a substantial user base for a messaging app with only 30 queries per second. Parse is running a business. They give you 30 API req/sec so that you can try out their service and see how it works. But if you are designing an app for a significant user base, you will surely have to pay, as you are expecting Parse to run the servers for you.
With that out of the way, it would be normal for a (typical) messaging app to make at least one API request per sent message to the server. The server is responsible for accepting, routing, holding, and delivering messages. It would also be normal for that sent message to result in a push notification, and an API request from the client app to retrieve the message. The general workflow would be:
User sends message
App uploads message to server
Server determines where message is headed
Server sends push notification to recipient
Recipient app queries server for pending message(s)
Recipient app displays message(s) for recipient user
That's two API requests and a push notification for each sent message.
Beyond that, depending on your messaging service design, the server may also store all messages so that later, on a different device, a user can open the app and it will download the history, so as to appear synchronized.
Now, surely there are ways to reduce the number of server API requests. Your app could batch messages locally, your server could batch push notifications, and your clients could batch queries (or you could do all three). All of these options could help dramatically reduce the number of server API requests you pay for, but they will also reduce the responsiveness and user experience of your messaging service.
You could also design a sophisticated peer-to-peer communication system (like Skype was in the past) removing servers from the messaging flow. However, you would have to design complicated authentication and verification systems, complicated routing systems, complicated storage systems, etc. A lot of work. And even if you did, I don't know if Apple would allow it on the App Store. A lot of time, work, and uncertainty to avoid paying the small cost for a server.
Regarding push notifications: Push notifications are sent from a server to a recipient client app. Your iPhone cannot push notification another iPhone. There will always be a server in the middle. Your app does not need to be open to receive a push notification. iOS will receive it, and then deliver it to your app. If your app is closed, iOS will (partly) open it in the background to deliver the message.
I think I had once seen a way to tell the Apple Push Notification Service to re-send notifications that were unsuccessfully delivered on their first attempt. Is there a way to do this and can you point me to some information regarding this?
My goal is to send a notification to 100 people and if 10 of them fail to be delivered, have those 10 failures retry.
Unfortunately, as far as I know, no such functionality exists directly. You can check that the notification time to live is long enough, go with a persistent notification solution (Urban Airship), or do your own delivery verification and redelivery through some back end service of your own which would work with Apple's feedback service.
If a delivery failed (APNS connection is lost), APNS would attempt to deliver only the latest notification when the connection to APNS is re-established. Your other notifications would not be delivered if this is the case. If you are looking for something persistent, look at Urban Airship and similar services (Pusher may be another, though I have not used it) that offer functionality similar to an e-mail inbox for various mobile platforms including iOS.
If you're seeing issues with the latest notification not making it through, you might want to check that the TTL is not too short on that notification. That's all that comes to mind.