I have this strange problem with iOS Push Notifications:
I configured my server to send push notifications, yet sometimes they are not delivered.
In order to get them back to work on a specific device, I have to turn OFF the Wi-Fi and switch it back ON. After that the message is received.
I'm still trying to put my finger on that issue, without luck.
More Info:
1.Server is working in sandbox mode.
2.Development certificates are in use.
3.Other notifications still works while mine won't (Facebook, Whatsapp).
In my theory, there are some differences between test APNS server, and real APNS server.
I do not think that is your problem.
Log something after send a message to APNS server
Try to take off the sandbox and set it to false.
Check your certificates.. if you have ad hoc certificate, notifications will only work when you create an IPA and install it on your device. Or if you download the app from the applestore.
Another issue can may cause your problem is the Data traffic.
If your phone does not have internet unless it connects to wifi, the device doesn't recive the push notification until it is not connected to wifi.
Hope it helps.
Related
I am doing MDM implementation in iOS and I have one server for its implementation.I have gone through the documents and understood the process that we have to undergo.But Simply I don’t understand how it will happen.I have one server and one device.I have my PEM file enrolled in the server.
As the process of MDM says server sends push notification through the device and the information that is present in the message in only the identifying token.Then device is connected to the server and sends an idle message confirming that device is ready for the commands.
My question is how device receives the push notification.If app is in back ground state and it gets a notification to connect to the server is there any method to detect it and send the feedback or is it happening automatically or we have to write some code for it. Also how does the plist (that we get in command) make changes in the settings (unlock to lock) .Do we save it somewhere in the device configuration?
I have got a lot of questions about the command format but did not get anything how the command works.May be I am missing basic iOS coding.please just explain me the above format.
how device receives the push notification.If app is in back ground state and it gets a notification to connect to the server
First of all, you will have to implement server side only for iOS MDM. Client side is implemented by Apple and MDM client is baked into iOS.
As part of OS it dosn't have restriction which usual iOS apps has. It has a persistent channel to APNS and as soon as somebody send a push notification to APNS, the device will receive it through this persistent channel and will start doing what it should be doing.
Also how does the plist (that we get in command) make changes in the settings (unlock to lock) >.Do we save it somewhere in the device configuration?
The answer is the same. You don't have to implement anything on the iOS side. It's all done by Apple- MDM client will get the command, parse it, save it to appropriate places and enforce appropriate policies.
I developed a web API for my mobile app use it.
This API was developed with Django, and I'm using the django-push-notifications lib to handle the push notifications.
The push notifications were working fine for all the devices, until it stopped working for few of them, which worked at some point, for no apparent reason.
I already debugged the server and I can see the messages being sent to APNS and on the correct format. Also reviewed the certificates, and all is working as it should. I'm using the production certificate sending to the appropriate server.
I'm sure that this is not a problem with certs, since some other phones receive the notifications.
Where should I start looking for the problem now?
Thanks.
They are not reliable! There is no guarantee that push notifications will actually be delivered, even if the APNS server accepted them.
As far as your server is concerned, push notifications are fire-and-forget; there is no way to find out what the status of a notification is after you’ve sent it to APNS. The delivery time may also vary, from seconds up to half an hour.
Also, the user’s iPhone may not be able to receive push notifications all the time. They could be on a WiFi network that does not allow connections to be made to APNS because the required ports are blocked. Or the phone could be turned off.
See this link
Are you sure that those some devices does't have a development version of app ?
Try to generate a combined p12 certificate of apn development certificate and apn production certificate , than try to call gateway.push.apple.com and gateway.sandbox.push.apple.com separately.
I want to send push notification from a iOS device to another iOS device without using backend server. Is it possible for an iOS device to act like a server and send push notification to APNs server?.
Thanks in advance.
Theoretically you can send Apple Push Notifications from a device directly to another device. All you need are the push certificate of the app, the device token of the device you are sending the notification to, and code that establishes a secure TLS connection to the APNS servers.
However, there are several practical problems that make the use of a server almost mandatory :
You need a single place where all the device tokens of all the devices that installed your app will be sent to and persisted in. The best such place would be a server. Without a server, how would device A send its device token to other devices that want to send it push notifications?
Apple require that you keep connections with the APNS server open for as long as possible and use the same connection for sending many notifications. If you open a connection to APNS server on your device, it will probably be short lived (since devices switch networks frequently, and don't stay connected to the internet all the time). Therefore, if you try to send many notifications frequently, and each time use a new connection to APNS, you will probably be banned (since Apple would treat this as DDoS attack).
If you store the push certificate in each device that installs your app (to allow it to send push notifications to other devices directly), aside from the security issue of storing the certificate in many places, you'll have to publish a new version of your app each time the push certificate expires (once a year), and push notifications would stop working for users who don't upgrade to the new version.
Try NWPusher.
It has an iOS framework for sending pushes and has an iOS demo application that sends push notifications from iOS to iOS.
You also need to consider Server costs (other than maintenance and development time if you code your own server).
By sending the push directly from the app device:
- you obtain a much better scalability (since you don't have to centralize everything on your server)
- you don't have to pay for server cost or other service's cost
You can use for iOS:
- https://github.com/noodlewerk/NWPusher Pusher
And for Android:
- Send push notification GCM by java
I need to test if device token is received properly (if registration is successful), notification is received and badge count is updated in simulator. I know that we cant use push notification from simulator and check if badge count is updated from simulator. But my question is, will I be able to test by connecting with my device and debug from Xcode. Or Is there any other way to check before giving a beta test.
I have got the development and distribution (ad hoc) provisioning profiles.
I checked if push notification is enable in these profiles.
I use development to debug from simulator using device.
I followed all the steps required to set push notification from app side.
Is there a way to send notification manually and check if its received properly. Since the changes in the server are not yet completed I need to check it from app side.
Somebody please help me out.
Thanks in advance.
Yes, you can connect your device and debug from Xcode. You'll be able do see if the registration to APNS succeeded or failed based on the callback method being called (either the one that returns the device token or the one that indicates an error).
However, you can't send a notification without the server side. Well, technically you can, but it will be as complicated as implementing the push at the server side (you'll have to establish a TLS connection with APN server and send a notification in the binary format that Apple expects), and probably more complicated, since you'll have to implement it in Objective C.
I implemented push notification in my app.
It is working fine.
Now the problem is even after i deleted my app from device it is getting the push notifications.
So is there any way to unregister the app from push notification when it is deleted from the device.
Hoping for your help.
Thanks in advance.
In Apple push notification there is something called - Feedback Service. So when a user deletes an app, the service provider should ideally stop sending notifications to that device. But Apple does not notify the service that "this device is not using your app, dont send notifications". So instead you need to poll for this info.
Every day you might need to hit Apple Notification servers asking it to give you device Ids who have deleted your app. Once you get them you mark them in your DB as deleted thereby not sending any more notifications. Hope this is what you wanted.
From Apple Documentation -
... Apple Push Notification Service includes a feedback
service that APNs continually updates with a per-application list of
devices for which there were failed-delivery attempts. The devices are
identified by device tokens encoded in binary format. Providers should
periodically query the feedback service to get the list of device
tokens for their applications, each of which is identified by its
topic. Then, after verifying that the application hasn’t recently been
re-registered on the identified devices, a provider should stop
sending notifications to these devices.
Access to the feedback service takes place through a binary interface
similar to that used for sending push notifications. You access the
production feedback service via feedback.push.apple.com, port 2196;
you access the sandbox feedback service via
feedback.sandbox.push.apple.com, port 2196. As with the binary
interface for push notifications, you must use TLS (or SSL) to
establish a secured communications channel. The SSL certificate
required for these connections is the same one that is provisioned for
sending notifications. To establish a trusted provider identity, you
should present this certificate to APNs at connection time using
peer-to-peer authentication.
Be sure to checkout - Issues with Feedback Service
Having not seen this answer so far, there is a small note in the Apple "Troubleshooting Push Notifications" document.
In short, if you delete the last push enabled app, the persistent connection from the device to Apples push server is broken before the server is told that the app has been deleted.
Solution: keep at least one push enabled app on your device.
There is the explanation from the document:
Issues with Using the Feedback Service
If you remove your app from your device or computer and then send a push notification to it, you would expect to have the device token rejected, and the invalidated device token should appear on the feedback service. However, if this was the last push-enabled app on the device or computer, it will not show up in the feedback service. This is because deleting the last app tears down the persistent connection to the push service before the notice of the deletion can be sent.
You can work around this by leaving at least one push-enabled app on the device or computer in order to keep the persistent connection up. To keep the persistent connection to the production environment up, just install any free push-enabled app from the App Store and you should then be able to delete your app and see it appear in the feedback service.
Recall that each push environment has its own persistent connection. So to keep the persistent connection to the sandbox environment up, install another development push-enabled app."