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.
Related
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.
I have an app that creates pdf's for the user. When this app creates a new pdf (say on the users i-pad) I want the iwatch to display a notification saying a new pdf has been created.
Does this require a server, it was my understanding apple could provide this service.
Any help or tips would be appreciated!
First to address the difference between local and push notifications. Local Notifications would be used on the specific device the user is on at the time, and is normally scheduled for a specific time such as the reminder app notifying you at a scheduled time. Push notification are sent via a server to other devices.
Since you want to send to the other devices you will want to implement push notifications. In order to do this the user will need your app on all devices. Additionally you will need to have a login system so you know which devices belong to the same user. From there you will need a push notification service that can do targeted push notifications. There are many services out there and you will need to decide which one is right for your situation.
Push notifications are sent to the device by using the device token Apple provides after the user approves notifications for your app. Each app on each device has their own device token. So in addition to targeted notifications you will want a push service that allows you to setup channels such as parse.com, that way you can setup a channel specific to each user (email, username, or ...). Then when your user logs in on any device and approves getting push notifications, their channel will be set to (whatever option you choose) and you can trigger the push notification to the specific channel and will send the notification to any device.
There are other consideration but this is a good place to start.
Local notification is just that, local to that device. Remote notification is what you need. You will either need to create a server for this purpose or use one of the variety of third-party services (Urban Airship, Parse, etc) to provide that functionality.
Clarification point -- when you say:
I want their iphone, and every other device that they have to receive a notification that a new pdf has been created
it is assumed that you mean "every device of theirs that is running your app and has approved notifications from your app". If you're trying to piggy-back on some magic AppleID-related foo, that won't be possible.
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.
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.
I want to create an iOS chatting app using APNS. If I have 10,000 active and they are continuing chatting, will apple block my developer account ? Is there any limitation regarding this?
I would discourage you from using APNS as a backbone of an "chatting app".
If you need fast chatting functionality you should write your own TCP-socket based server.
If every-few-second syncing is o.k. you can get away with a HTTP-based server backend (but all the pull-syncing can be hard on network traffic - so TCP-socket is still better choice).
You could however use APNS for fallback - when your app on certain device is not responding (i.e. is not connected to server) you can send an initial message trough APNS (to wake up your app & to notify the user there is a message waiting for him).
As soon as the user opens your app you should switch back to your TCP-socket or HTTP request based server communication.
As for your question: no, Apple would most probably (one can never know for sure) not reject your app just because of using APNS for chatting. But note (as the others said allready): messages between two users will get "lost" if they would interact too frequently - see the link Roman Barzyczak gave you.
"If you are sending multiple notifications to the same device or computer within a short period of time, the push service will send only the last one."
more information: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#technotes/tn2265/_index.html
but Apple wont block your developer account :)
You can use them for messaging but you are going to quickly find out that there is no guarantee they will arrive. This is known as the black hole of push notifications. ;-)
I like this answer here.
First try to use an APNS only solution.
Make your push notifications stateless (they only serve as "Hey you have some new stuff in the server").
So when the client gets a push notification it asks the server for new data (messages or other stuff).
Use OneSignal to simplify the code that sends push notifications (from the back-end). If a user in your app gets a message after 10 seconds he dose not care if you used TCP,socket.io or xmpp...
Even Whatsapp's messages can take couple of seconds to arrive.
A chat app is not a realtime game. A delay of couple of seconds will be acceptable by end users.