Is it possible to find information about Apple Push Notification Service usage?
How many people are using, and how many people are declining them?
Or maybe, somebody already has this sort of information?
Apple does not provide a lot of information about how many users actually accept/decline push notifications but you can get a good idea of what's going on by comparing the number of total installs and the number of valid push notification tokens you have ( I'm assuming that since you are interested in analytics you already have a Push server set up ) Push notification tokens are only generated if a user accepts.
If you need more information about the actual push notifications, you'll need to get your hands dirty and actually add tracking code in the application. If you're looking for something free try Google Analytics for iOS with Custom Event Tracking: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/ios/v2/events
Urban Airship also provides a pretty good analytics service, but you have to be using their push notification server: http://urbanairship.com/products/push-messaging#analyze
Related
I am have an app with push notification implemented in APNs, ie, Firebase has not been used. I need to implement a topic subscription like feature(one present in firebase). Is there a way to implement a topic subscription(One in FCM) or similar option with APNs service? Any heads up is appreciated
I think you will need to manage topic related things on your backend, i-e mobile devices will subscribe to certain topics which are already made at backend, your backend needs to handle all the related things like creating a new topic, assigning respective device token to those topics etc.
I am also looking to work on this
I want to be able to send push notifications in my app. But i would like to be able to send them to certain categories like country
any way to do this if there is 25-30 different categories
also a way for somebody to pick a category and then get push notifications for that category
I handle sending push notifications myself, the backend receives push keys from the mobile apps after login, this way I can decide which user I want to send push notifications... This way you can decide how to implement subscription and push mechanism yourself, and check if a user has a topic enabled and is in the specified country.
Anyway: more info will get you better responses: ios? android? external push notification service? used frameworks?
Have you considered using Firebase Topics?
Based on the publish/subscribe model, FCM topic messaging allows you to send a message to multiple devices that have opted in to a particular topic. You compose topic messages as needed, and FCM handles routing and delivering the message reliably to the right devices.
For example, users of a local tide forecasting app could opt in to a
"tidal currents alerts" topic and receive notifications of optimal
saltwater fishing conditions in specified areas. Users of a sports app
could subscribe to automatic updates in live game scores for their
favorite teams.
You could simply subscribe/unsubscribe users from the relevant country topic.
I have two IOS applications and I want to send new message push notification on both applications through pubnub ? Is it possible ? As apple has different APNS certificate for different application and pubnub can use only one certificate at a time, is there any hack possible through which I can send push notification on multiple application ?
This is becoming a more common use case especially with the popularity of car/taxi dispatch applications where you have a driver app that communicates with a separate rider app. There are other use cases but this is the most common one.
Currently, the PubNub Account Dashboard only supports one push cert per key set which means you have a couple of workarounds until we do support multiple push certs per key set.
Two Apps
Use 1 set of keys as the primary keys where you do all pub/sub operations, presences, etc.
You would also include the mobile push payload (apns/gcm) in every publish you send.
One application will register for push notifications using this set of keys.
You will also publish the push payload only on the second set of keys that the other app will register for push notifications on.
That other app will also pub/sub, etc. on the first set of keys.
And each set of keys will have a separate push cert as you already understand.
One App
The alternative is to just have one app (so one push cert with one set of PubNub keys) and you provide a means for the end user to register as a user of one module or the other (modules == apps now). Then just only show the functionality/UI that applies to that type of user. I understand this provides for a larger app footprint and more restrictive release cycles with both modules (apps) in a single app.
Neither of the above solutions are optimal but it is what many customers are implementing for now. We do have the multi-push cert feature on the roadmap but it requires some other features to be in place before we roll this out. Please follow #pubnub Twitter account and the PubNub blog for announcements of this feature and other great improvements that are coming soon.
Questions (from the comments)
Lets say I have two apps, one is driver and another is rider, do I have to create two apps on pubnub and get two set of keys?
As far as I understood from your explanation, after creating two apps on pubnub, we will have to use one keys for chat and another for push notification, am I correct?
In case of using another keys only for push notification, how will it identify to which rider app or driver app it has to send push notification?
Answers
I am answering all three questions in one shot here. I hope this makes it clear.
Apps in the PubNub Account Dashboard are basically just organizational folders so they don't really have to have a direct relationship to an actual application, so it really doesn't matter if you create 1 or 2 Apps in this scenario. But I would create 1 App and two sets of keys: Primary keys and Secondary keys. Both of your iOS apps (Driver and Rider) will use the Primary keys for all pub/sub of messages.
But for push notifications, Driver app will register for push notifications only on the Primary key's push cert and the Rider app will only register for push notifications on the Secondary key's push cert. Whenever you publish a message to the Primary key, you include the push notification payload for APNS (pn_apns : { aps : { alert :...) and you also publish just the push notification payload on the Secondary key.
Was wondering how facebook and instagram gets their notification notices whenever you're using the app. eg. Message number on facebook, Somebody followed you on instagram, etc. Is it using push notifications? Or just regular executions of an api? It seems expensive to do push notifications cuz of the monthly fee of a VPS. (Based off of this tutorial http://www.raywenderlich.com/32960/apple-push-notification-services-in-ios-6-tutorial-part-1)
I wanted to know any other options that I can use as I only need something witht the same effect as facebook or instagram.
Thoughts?
Yes. They do use push notification for updates of friends/follow/IM.
The cost of using Push Notifications is something big company can easily afford and it is nothing compared to how much money a iOS app can make to the dev.
I am developing an alarm app in iphone. To set alarm I have to use APNS (Apple Push Notification Service). Can you suggest me how to do this or some important tutorial regarding this.
Start here for authoritative information from the Push Notification Service Programming Guide. You might also search here on Stack Overflow, and on Google. If you can explain in more detail what, exactly, you're looking for help with, we can help with more specific information.
If your plan is to have someone configure alarms on some web site (or desktop app, or whatever), and the use push to send a notification to the device when the alarm "goes off", I encourage you to reconsider that. Push is an unreliable medium (in the same sense as UDP): no guarantees are made as to when, or whether, the notifications will be delivered. It is not something you should depend on to happen at a particular time. It does not get you around the prohibition on background processes on iPhone.
That said, you can certainly try. The Programming Guide I linked above will get you started. There are definitely many APNS tutorials on the web. And if you have specific questions, this site can certainly help. But right now, you're asking, essentially, "how do I write my app?" That's a pretty broad scope for a Q&A site like this.
I believe that you actually mean Local Notifications, not Apple Push Notification Service (APNS). Using Local Notifications you can set timers that will show an alert to the user after a specific time. Using APNS you can basically push events from a server to the users handset.
I suggest you read the Push Notification Service Programming Guide.