Prevent auto generated push notification - ios

When we receive a push notification while the application is in the background mode, it automatically uses aps and other parameters like Sound, Badge, Alert to generate a notification that appears on top.
What I want is to prevent that auto generated notification let it call didReceiveRemoteNotification and generate my custom local notification and display it on top and notification centre.
The reason behind this is that the message is customised according to situation which is managed locally after some data received in push notification.
I haven't tried anything, because I couldn't find any solution for this kind of scenario. I don't even know whether it is even possible or not.
Any help or other suggestion that could to solve this other way is highly appreciated.

You can have a look to iOS Silent Notifications here
But you have 2 differences cases :
1 your app is in front, the did receive remote is called, and the notification is not displayed.
2 your app is in background, and I don't think the didreceiveRemove is called.
So in the 2 situations, you will not achieve your goal. You shroud maybe try to customize the notification before sending it

Even when your App is in the background, suspended, inactive or terminated it is woken by a Silent push notification.
(Note: the only scenario when the app is not woken by silent push is when it had been killed off by the user from the control centre)
So you can send a silent push, perform whatever operations you need to perform on the data and then generate a local notification which would go in the tray.

Related

APNS Modify Notification to be a Silent Notification

I have a weird feature I'm looking to add to iOS and am not sure if it's possible.
I want to send push notifications to all users through a third party and have the client decide whether or not to show it depending on some feature. I was reading that I can modify the notification before it reaches the app and was hoping that I could receive the notification, do some logic and, if the criteria is satisfied, modify the notification to be silent. But I'm not sure if this is possible.
Has anybody been able to do this?
As far as I know, it's not possible to hide a notification after it was sent.
You can modify the payload through a service extension but I'm pretty sure you cannot hide it from the user.
To decide on the client if a notification is visible or not - you'll have to send your notification as silent to begin with and then trigger a local notification.
The problems with that are:
Silent notifications are disabled if the user disabled Background Activity.
Silent notifications have a lower priority and might be throttled after a while.
The purpose of silent pushes is to inform the app of new content to perform a background fetch.
My recommendation is to put whatever logic you want on the server side before sending the notification.
For Android you can decide whether to show the notification or not.
For iOS, you can only modify the way the notification is presented but you cannot stop it from being shown. In order to modify the way the notification is presented to the user on iOS you need to add a Notification Extension Service.

Notification - when app is killed

I have implemented AWS SNS push notification service.
We have an issue which is explained below :
Scenario :
We are trying to save the notification message we receive as a part of requirement.
When the app is killed (swipe out from recent apps) we are able to receive notification, also we are able to save the notification message when we open the message directly from the notification panel it works fine,but when we open the app directly the notification message is not getting saved.
In short we are not able to know if we had received a notification message if we directly open the app rather than clicking the message from the notification panel.
Is this default behavior ? or is there any work around for this ?
Have looked into many posts on about Push Notifications but haven't seen any threads pointing to this scenario.
This is a normal behavior, and there is no workaround.
If your app is killed by the user, it won't be able to run ANY code before it's manually launched again.
If it's manually launched from a notification, this notification's payload will be handled by your AppDelegate.
On top of that, don't forget that Push notifications are Best Effort. That means that they are not reliable, they can be heavily delayed or never delivered at all. Don't rely on Push notifications to achieve any critical work.
If you need to keep a copy of your notifications in-app, keep them server side and fetch them as you would do with any other object.
In order to execute code when the app is killed by the user you need to implement VOIP using PushKit framework provided by apple.
VOIP push unlike regular push notification enables the app to become active even if the app is killed by user.

iOS Push Notification - check if the banner is showing when app is in background

I have a VoIP app, where the incoming call notification is very important.
The problem is, sometimes I don't get the push notification (even Apple said it's not guaranteed). But, I do have a mechanism to notice that an call is coming while the app is in the background.
So, what I want to do is.. still use Push Notification as the main handler for incoming call (because it handles the situation when app is closed). However, if the push notification failed to deliver and my app gets the call invite, I will raise a local notification, telling user that you have an incoming call.
My question is... how can I check if a notification is showing before I decide whether to fire a local notification?
AFAIK you can only detect the notification when the user taps on the banner OR if the app is open when the notification comes. So I can't see a way to detect if the notification has come yet or not. Just adding to the pain, push notification is famous for its unreliability.
There’s no API to get any information about the state of your notifications. Since you’re making a VoIP app, you have the option to have it get woken up for incoming data, which would let you post your “incoming call” notification whenever you need it—see the “Configuring Sockets for VoIP Usage” section here.

Apple push notification-like service, only when running in foreground

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.

How can I handle unread push notifications in iOS?

I have a iOS 5.1 application that registers to the APNS service to receive notifications. The register is successful and I receive the notifications correctly. The problem comes when I try to handle the notifications.
Once the application is running, the method didReceiveRemoteNotification in the AppDelegate is called correctly and so the notification is handled as intended. This, however, only happens when the application is running on the foreground.
However, when the application is running on the background or is simply stopped, that method is not called. I've read that you should add some lines to the method didFinishLaunchingWithOptions method to obtain the notification from the userInfo dictionary, and handle it. This works just fine, but ONLY when the application is opened by clicking on the notification at the Notification Center. This means that if you open the application by clicking on its badge, or simply by changing context if you were running it on the background, the app never realises that a notification came in. Additionally, if more than one notification was received, we can only handle one of them at once by clicking on the Notification Center, which is a pain :-)
Is there any way to read the pending notifications in the Notification Center? I know there is a way to flush them using the method cancelAllLocalNotifications but I haven't found a way to just read them. And I really need to handle all of them. I thought of implementing a communication protocol with the third-party notification server to retrieve the information again when the application comes to the foreground, but since the information is already in the operating system I would find it strange if it's impossible to access it somehow.
So, does anybody know a way to do it? Thanks in advance.
When a push notification arrives and the user clicks 'cancel', your app has no way to read that push notification again. You have to implement a separate functionality (most probably on server-side) to fetch a list of notifications sent to this device.
For example, if a chat functionality is provided in your app and you send chat messages via push notifications then you should also keep chat messages on the server. If a user clicks 'Cancel' on any push notification then that chat message will not be displayed on the iOS device. In that case when a app comes in foreground later, you make a call to the server and fetch all the past chat messages (sent via push notification).
Ok, So a possible solution would be to have another database table with the messages in with a 'read' flag and a messageID field? Which by default the read flag is NO, then when the app successfully reads this and displays, it updates the flag to YES?
And with only 256 bytes to play with, what sort of ID field length would be necessary?
Edit,
Executed this plan and its working successfully.

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