I need to update my users for things that happened around their current location while the app is in the background.
To my understanding:
If my server sends a Push Notification to a client, the client would immediately show that message.
I can set up the app so that there is a specific location, with a given radius could fire a message.
So what I want to understand if it is even possible to update my users about things that are new in their locations.
I was thinking of two possible solutions, I am not sure they are possible.
One, I guess if the Push Notifications would allow a function to run prior to its display,
deciding if the message should appear.
For example: something happened in area x,y - The server initiates a message to all devices. Only the devices within range of x,y and a radius z, would show the message to the users.
Maybe the Regional Monitoring service can send a message to my server and my server can then decide if to send a Push Notification back to the client...
For example
The user has entered a defined location, determined by the app. The app sends a message to the server. The server decides if a message is due.
Any ideas? is that even possible?
Filtering push notifications by topic is something you need to do on the server side, not the client side. Apple specifically states not to send messages to users that aren't relevant and you won't be able to block them when the app isn't running. Additionally, if you are using a service to manage your push notifications you don't want to pay for messages that aren't relevant.
So when you register a device into your database, you should register what topics that person is subscribing to (ie. save a list of topics that user is eligible to receive). Then when the event is triggered that generates the push notification only send to devices that are registered to that topic. I believe a number of push platforms have this capability already built in. On UrbanAirship and Azure Notification Hubs you can use their tags feature. Or you can develop it yourself if you do your own push server.
Take a look at Parse. They have this kind of functionality baked right in, just send the push to clients that match a geoPoint query.
Related
We have iOS push notifications configured and running. However, we would like the user to select which categories are interesting to receive and which are not important and would like to omit receiving those notifications.
Is there any way to do this through Apple push notification itself rather than through the server sending the notifications? (We can change the sent JSON). Can the iPhone send which categories it would like to receive and which are not needed by registering them to Apple? Other choice, can we interrupt the push notification before being shown and decide whether it should be shown or not through a delegate? So far, I can't find an available method to do either.
Any help is appreciated
The short answer is not from the client side. If you want a solution that works 100% of the time you will need to do something on a server which only sends the types of push notifications the user subscribes to.
If your App is in background there is no concept of "categories" of PUSH notifications and you have no control over if they show up in the notification center.
You can examine inbound push when the App is in the foreground and decide on the basis of some meta data to display or not, but that is not a 100% solution.
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 have successfully set up push notifications which are sending and being received too all dev ices, However i want to now add the option of the push notification to only be sent to certain clients.
for example I would want to send clients who downloaded the application in spain a certain notification and then people who are in the uk a different notification.
Is there a way that i can add anything to my code to be able to figure this out?
I'm not to sure what to google either? Any answers better then what i already know.
When your app transmits the device token to your server, you could also send the customer's location. On your server, resolve this location to a country and store it with the device token. Then when you need to send a notification, you can look up the country for the specific device token.
A very simple task that took me 30 minutes to implement on an android.
A web server sends a message to device. Without user interaction a receipt is sent back. User understands that this is a desired behavior. When user opens the app he/she can send additional acknowledgement.
My understanding is that as long as I am not using location service I cannot run app in background continuously (or periodically). Push notifications will require user interaction, otherwise it's just a badge and a message.
This seems like a trivial problem but makes my head hurt and want me to give up.
Is Enterprise subscription the only way for me to get the app to our company users?
First you need to ask user permission to send PUSH notifications. Once the user agrees for you to send PUSH notifications to his device, you need to get the device ID and store it in your servers. This is the FIRST phase of PUSH-NOTIFICATION
In the next phase (SECOND phase), lets say you want to notify the user about something, what you do is get all deviceIDs for that user (he might have registered more than 1 iOS device) and send some X message to his device(s) leveraging apple's PUSH infrastructure. You need to pass the deviceID's to Apple (along with a bunch of other stuff) as this is how it identifies which device gets this X message.
Also initially while registering for PUSH, you need to write a little code to configure how your PUSH notification will look like. Would it have SOUND, BADGE, MESSAGE etc.
For all this to happen you as a app developer do not need to concern whether you app is ACTIVE or not. iOS takes care of it. After the initial PUSH registration the user too is not involved. You dont need to run your app in the background nor do you need to register for continuous location updates.
Have I understood your question correctly?