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?
Related
Since push notifications may not be delivered sometimes (you can lose a few of them), you can not run code after the iPhone is turned on to check if there is new information available from the server, and you can not run code if your iOS App is closed... What can you do if you want to be as more accurate as possible in for example a Chat App in iOS?
I mean, inform the user as faster as possible that he has new info available. Comparisons: WhatsApp is updated without any delay.
You can do background fetch if your App is in background. But if the App is closed and you miss a push, it's not going to be up to date until the next push arrives or user opens the App. The same with silent notifications. If the app is terminated by the user, you are not going to receive it. Is there any way to solve it? It must be because other Apps do it... If there is any "private and secret" API that they are using (I read about this answer when no one know how to do that)... Is there any way to apply to use it?
UPDATE:
I'm using push notifications. The goal is to fix when a push doesn't arrive. Example: User A send chat message to user B. User B doesn't have the App open. The system lose the push. User B is not going to receive the message until he open the App.
Push notifications seems to be your only way even if you do loose a few of them, which I don't know how you would since they are pushed to apples secure server... but what do I know. As long as the user turns on the push notifications you should be fine. They may be delayed due to apples way of handling them. Honestly push seems to be the future, having your app constantly every minute or two check for new messages is a huge battery water in conjunction with normal texting apps. Your app should provide the best live data but since apple restricts to push notifications when the app is off or not running just stick to push notifications and only push major events to the user. I believe you can set up a job scheduler using quartz or schedulator to setup your server to push notifications to your app.
I want to develop an app, but before I actually start developing, I've been doing some research so that i can be sure it's going to work in the way I'd like to do this.
You can imagine the app as a kind of news app, where the user can indicate whether he wants to receive push notifications, and may also indicate that he only wants to receive a push notification if it is in X distance from his current location.
And this is probally a problem on IOS, On android it would be no problem if a push notification came in to read the current position of the user and settings and then show the push notification or not.
As far as I've read this is a problem on iOS, the system receives the push and the app can not respond to it unless the user clicks on it.
Theres also another problem about closing an app on IOS, ideally a app should not be closed (swiped out) by the user because this would be a force close on IOS.
From ive seen most users still swipe out apps, and this would mean that my app cannot run background tasks anymore.
This is what i thougt about:
Send Silent push, app download data on the background -> Check if this meets the user settings, if so show a local notification. (30 sec time to handle, but do not know if it is possible to throw a local push here too.)
The app sends data on the background over the user's current position before sending a push, the server checks for which apps it should be sent (actually no solution, too much data usage as it may be that the user is only one Specific location, need a good server if the app is used on thousands of devices.).
Does anyone have any idea how to handle this problem?
Suppose I have an e-commerce ios app (like snapdeal, flipkart etc.) and I want to make my app notified when there is any change in the data stored on the server.
For instance, take an example of price change of any product in any category, so how can I update the price for that product without putting it to user's knowledge, whether the user is on that particular screen (currently seeing that product for which the price is changed) or on any other screen.
is it possible to do? if YES, how can I achieve that?
Thanks in advance!!
You have to use Apple Push Notification Service to do that.
It allows your server to send data to your app, that warns user or not (you choose), and your app is awake by this push a can work on background mode.
In order to allow you app to work in background, you have to enable Background fetch options
From Apple Background execution guide :
Apps that need to check for new content periodically can ask the system to wake them up so that they can initiate a fetch operation for that content. To support this mode, enable the Background fetch option from the Background modes section of the Capabilities tab in your Xcode project. (You can also enable this support by including the UIBackgroundModes key with the fetch value in your app’s Info.plist file.)
Edit about BaaS
As mentioned in comments, implementing the whole push notification system yourself can be difficult, especially if you are doing it for the first time.
That's why you can use a BaaS (Backend as a Service) that handle push notification for you like Parse.com, Firebase or whatever you want. It simplify a lot the process, but it remains APNS on the back, so it's important to understand how it works.
I'd recommend, like Mr. Blackus said in his answer, to use Apple Push Notification service. However, I will add one bit of information -
Don't use the service to send the actual data, only send a small packet of information telling your application to request more data from the server.
The process should be something like this:
Server asks Apple service to send Push notification to your app.
App receives push notification (but does not show any badge to the user).
App interprets the data sent from the server as a "refresh data" notification.
Fire POST or GET request upon determining type of notification received.
Update your data from the request response.
1.) Polling - app asks for list of products whose prices has changed. You can setup a timer, which triggers itself after every X seconds.
2.) Socket connection - between app and the server. App can generate a unique token (such as identifierForVendor), and use it in the socket conenction. Server can notifiy all the apps (using this token), to notify about the changed prices.
Approach 2 is better, as it is less expensive ( in terms of networking).
Hope this helps.
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 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.