I am building a TVOS app for the new Apple TV that needs to get notifications from a server to update it's display. Remote notifications are not allowed with TVOS, and it actually displays an error when you try to register the app for remote notifications.
With this being said, are there any alternatives to what I need?
To clarify:
- The app stays running indefinitely, showing a display.
- When the user adds content to the display, I want to notify any apps that are logged in to the same user to update the display.
- I cannot use remote notifications.
Please let me know if this makes sense, and thank you in advance for your help!
What part of the registration errors out for you? Notification dialogs and banners may not really make sense on tvOS, but can you send a silent push notification? All you need to do to register for these is
[application registerForRemoteNotifications];
You do not need to display the request dialog to the user for permission for silent notifications (you do need to have the remote notifications entitlement though.)
According to Apple's documents here, they allow CloudKit. CloudKit subscriptions rely on silent push notifications that I would assume would work on tvOS (without them it would severely cripple CloudKit)
If that still does't work, then you could create your own long polling connection (essentially, you would be making your own custom push notifications). It would only be able to send messages to devices that have the app opened however.
I guess you can have the app poll a web server at a given interval to check if any updates have been made...
Related
I have implemented all recommended methods in AppDelegate to get working Remote Notifications service.
I can accept them while running, while launching and while turned off.
But there is an issue, since I can't work with many received notifications while in background. I can work only with latest notification.
What is recommended manual to do that? How can I got all notifications received while in background? Is it only solvable via manual call to my service provider (sender of apns data)?
With all the projects I've worked on there hasn't been a way to locally store this information if the push notification is dismissed. In all those cases we used a small file on the server that the app would connect to and pull when it became active again. There was also some place in the app where the user could see all their notifications which, again, were stored on the server for quick retrieval.
With the way I understand push notifications to be setup, if the notification is dismissed the system discards it. It'll perform anything it's supposed to do (such as update the badge number and play the correct sound) but any additional information specific to that notification is lost.
Not sure if this helps, but if you just want to know how many notifications you have missed while you were in background. You can create a variable which contains notification number and store this in the app every time you handle notification. When you come out of background and receive a new notification you can subtract the new number with the stored number to find out the number of missed notifications. I don't think there is a way where iOS can give you complete data associated with all the notification device have received while the app was in background.
The best solution is to keep a list of sent notifications with all relevant data on your server, so the app can access that data when it launches. Sending multiple notifications with data that is not stored on the server can be risky, because the application only receives the notification when the user opens the app from that notification, so if they tap on one notification, the app will only every receive that one.
If you have them all in a list on your server, the app can simply go and pull that list down, and process it, making sure no data is lost.
How do you handle users who initially disable push notifications? I keep a record of push id's using EASYAPNS and I'm concerned that if someone disables push notifications, they'll miss out on some great features of my app.
What do you do if they want to enable notifications later on? If I create a settings tab for push notifications and they later on enable them, will the app then and there generate a push id, or is it a one time thing and they're out of luck if they don't register for notifications the first time the app launches?
Thanks
According to Apple's Local and Push Notifications Programming Guide,
"an application should register every time it launches and give its provider the current token.
(...)
Users can thereafter modify the enabled notification types in the Notifications preference of the Settings application, and you can retrieve the currently enabled notification types by calling the enabledRemoteNotificationTypes method."
The user can always go to the iPhone Settings and enable or disable notifications for your app, doesn't matter if he initially had it enabled or not.
You don't need to write the code for setting of Push Notification. iPhone itself has a feature to enable or disable Push Notifications, but application must have implemented the code ofr Push Notification.
How reliable do you find push notification on the iPhone to be? Does it improve when moving from the sandbox to production server?
I am testing (with the sandbox of course) and have found that notifications are often delayed or not received at all. I am not talking about sending multiple messages and only the last one arriving, as the documentation indicates, but any notification never showing up.
Also, I noticed that if I send a notification with an alert, and then send one with just a badge number, that the second notification will close the alert even after it's already opened. Does this happen between apps as well? For instance, if I send an alert for my app, and then the Facebook app sends a badge, will the Facebook badge close my alert window?
I have no development experience with iPhone apps, but I do know that if you have an unofficial unlocked phone (by using pwnage tool/blackrain etc) then the PUSH notifications might NEVER go through. In fact, it does go through, but to another user's iPhone.
This is because when an iPhone is unofficially network unlocked, it uses the Unique ID of some random individual's iPhone, which causes Push notifications to arrive on either phone (and yes, sometimes also on the unlocked phone it was intended for, but usually not)
Not sure if this is the case with you though, but AFAIK the service is pretty reliable if you follow Apple's rules. :)
The push notification seams better on production. You can always test it using ad-hoc distrbution which uses the production chanel to send the notifications.
I can confirm that production push notifications using
Production Push Notification Certificate
Adhoc Distribution Mobile Provisioning
TestFlight deployment
Production APNS server
works well, no need to publish your app to test production notifications
Production push notifications are not always received. If notifications are machine gunned 1 second apart the first one is received and the rest are not sent, thats my experience.
Where as on a windows phone, they are all received using the windows notification service.
I am building an app that uses the fine Urban Airship api to send the user push notifications.
The app keeps track of event dates that are added to the app by the user.
This means I have no server in place for dealing with push, the app itself simply
schedules a push notification with Urban AS when the user add the event date and time.
If the user decides to delete the event before it occurs I un-schedule it with Urban AS. All is good. I, however, would like to not send notifications to a user that has disabled notifications as these notifications are no free:)
I know the Push Notification API from Apple makes sure the user will not receive any notification if they turned them off in settings. They will simply ignore the scheduled notifications Urban AS sends, which is a waste of bandwidth and money.
How can I tell if the user has disabled the notification for my app?
Also, I see no other option than to test if the user has turned off notification and then tell Urban AS to cancel all notifications and if the user turns them back on, I will have to go through all events and re-scheduled them :/ each time the app runs.
Can anyone think of a way for me not to have to fill up my appDelegate with all kinds of conditional code for testing these scenarios? e.g. user has turned off push since last running the app, user has turned them on since last time. I am also concerned if the user will understand this behavior?
Guess I am just asking for a bit of best practice with this push / Urban Airship setup:)
Thanks.
As I see it, [[UIApplication sharedApplication] enabledRemoteNotificationTypes] will return the notification types the user has currently enabled for your app.
Otherwise, you are correct. You have to call this method on every app launch and, in the case that the user has reenabled notifications, reschedule all events that you had formerly deleted.
As to the question of filling up your app delegate with all kinds of conditionals, you might want to write a separate PushNotificationsController (not a UIViewController, just a NSObject subclass) that will handle all push-related stuff.
I have just heard that - " push notification " is possible in iPhone
I need following details.
what is push notification ?
How it works ?
What does it requires ?
Any sample code link is available ?
Any documentation link if available ?
Some guidance/tips from "StackOverFlow Masters" about developing the above requirements.
Thanks in advance for sharing your knowledge with Stackoverflow family & me.
The sort of background processing you're looking to do is not possible with push notification.
Push notification allows you to notify the user of something. An example would be a Twitter client that sends a notification when the user receives a direct message on Twitter.
Push notification can not react to things happening on the iPhone when the app is not running. Instead, it depends on you having a server that determines when to send a notification and then sends one.
I'm not seeing any need for background processing in your application. If you store the user's initial location, the next time the app loads you can get their location and calculate the distance between the two. If you're looking for the route travelled, you're out of luck unless you make a deal with AT&T like Loopt just did.
Push notification is not really for that purpose, you should read up on push notification in apples site here http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/RemoteNotificationsPG/Introduction/Introduction.html, its more for when theres data like a m essage for your user, you can have the user get it without having them open t he application. Now for your purpose, why cant you store the location when htey close the app, once the reopen the app you can reget a location, use the previous location and the new location to calculate the km travelled?
Although only tangentially related to this discussion, I think you might be interested in Loopt's agreement with AT&T to track user's iPhones (for a monthly fee).
Apple Push Notification service (APNs for short) is the centerpiece of the push notifications feature. It is a robust and highly efficient service for propagating information to devices such as iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices. Each device establishes an accredited and encrypted IP connection with the service and receives notifications over this persistent connection. If a notification for an application arrives when that application is not running, the device alerts the user that the application has data waiting for it.
Software developers (“providers”) originate the notifications in their server software. The provider connects with APNs through a persistent and secure channel while monitoring incoming data intended for their client applications. When new data for an application arrives, the provider prepares and sends a notification through the channel to APNs, which pushes the notification to the target device.
Check this link clearly explained Apple push notification services
http://mobiforge.com/developing/story/programming-apple-push-notification-services