How Google's Gmail app on iPhone disable notifications? - iphone

My question can seems weird, but I just realize that when I receive a push for a new mail from Gmail app and I open Gmail on a web page, the notification disappear.
Can someone explain me how this is working ?

This is related to this question, though it's not an exact duplicate.
This can be implemented with Apple Push Notifications.
Your server has to maintain for each user a list of device tokens of all the devices belonging to that user (iPhones, iPads, etc...).
When the user reads the message on one platform (whether via a web browser or via a mobile application), you can execute some API call on your server to notify it that the user read the message.
Then your server can send a follow-up push notification to all the devices belonging to that user with "badge"=0 (and without the "alert" and "sound" fields), and the notification will be cleared from the lock screen and app icon.

One possibility is that they use notifications delivered in the background (they get delivered directly to the app rather than being shown to the user), then use local notifications. Local notifications can be cancelled.
So it would go like this:
remote notification "there's a new e-mail" delivered in the background
local notification "new email"
...
you connect to the website
remote notification "user has seen new e-mail" delivered in the background
cancel local notification
I've never actually tried to do this, but I suppose that would be the way it works. I'm not aware of any (documented) way to cancel a remote notification directly.

Related

Can I delete a push notification from a device which have receive this push notification?

I have the following problem.
I look for a capability to delete a push notification from a device (iPhone respectively Apple Watch) but this device have receive the push notification.
The use case is that a USER A send a request to all available USER Bs. A push notification is send to all these USER Bs. At the moment the push notification arrive it will shown on their Apple Watch. One of the USER Bs answer that he accept this request. After he press the button to accept the request the notification should be deleted on all the other devices.
I really do not know a capability to do this.
But I know that you can handle this problem in Android as provide a unique ID for this notification. After that you can delete the other notifications with this particular ID.
Is their maybe a same way for iOS like it is provided in Android?
This doesn't really have anything to do with WatchKit/Apple Watch.
To answer your main question: no, you can't do this as it describe. Once you fire off a notification, it's in the user's hands to decide what they want to do with it.
As an alternative, you could maintain an "inbox" with every notification in your app and use the notification to prompt the user to check it. That way you could remove a notification from the inbox on the server side of things.

How can I control the Apple Push Notifications I receive

I have successfully created a server that sends Apple Push Notifications, and my iphone receives them.
For example I have Notification of type A and notifications of type B,
How can I control the types of notifications I received on the iphone side? For example I only want type A and not B (Just like Facebook, I want notifications for Friend Request, but not for Walls)
Thanks
you cannot stop your device on receiving a specific type of notification unless it is done on server side. Though you can ignore a notification when app is in running state as you get the notification in didReceiveRemoteNotification and you can simply ignore it after checking it but if app is in background or it is closed then you cannot control the incoming notifications from within your app.
you can make a service on server to set preferences for notification types.
from device, user can enable/disable the push service for individual features and update the preferences on server from device.
On server, before sending the PUSH, you can check for the preferences selected by user from the table and send only those notifications which the user has opted for.

Could one iOS application support multiple push notification registration?

This is the first time that I approach the push notification service and I'm little bit confused. I 'd like to have just some conceptual help, not code.
I need to build an app that should receive and register for different kind of notifications. For instance in my app I'd like that users could register for PROMO notifications category and NEWS notifications category, I'd like that they could choose which one they want to be notified.
Reading the Apple doc, that was not so clear to me, it seems that once the app device is registered I receive just one token and seems impossible to receive more tokens for different kind of registration(NEWS and PROMO for instance), because the token is related to the app and the device. Is that correct?
The other thing that is not so clear to me is, if a device is registered for a specific notification is it possible to send the notification only to a set o devices?
If nothing of that is offered by Apple Push services do you think that is possible to manage everything like that:
-I register the app device for notification if (PROMO || NEWS) are selected
-I get the token
-I send the token to my server giving also as additional info about the service which the user wants to subscribe
-The server (provider) register the token and the kind of subscription (PROMO || NEWS)
-Later when I have a notification to push I ask the server all the tokens registered for that specific category and then I send the notification only to those devices registered for that category.
Thanks for helping me out I'm really confused.
"Reading the Apple doc, that was not so clear to me, it seems that once the app device is registered I receive just one token and seems impossible to receive more tokens for different kind of registration(NEWS and PROMO for instance), because the token is related to the app and the device. Is that correct?"
YES
The other thing that is not so clear to me is, if a device is registered for a specific notification is it possible to send the notification only to a set o devices?
YES, you need a DB where you connect a Push Token with the related Services (promo | news). If you have a new Promo Push Message you send the message to all related token. on the app site, everytime the user change the categorie (promo / news) you should prpvide these infos to your service with the push token.
These are all problems that you have to solve yourself on the server side. The push service simply provides a means to send a single message to a single device. You have to figure out yourself which messages you want to send to which devices. Each message has to be sent individually, there's no way to "broadcast" a message to all your users directly.
You could think of the push tokens as email addresses – of course, one email address might be subscribed to different newsletters from the same publisher, but it's the publisher's job (yours) to figure out whom to send which newsletters, not the email provider's (Apple's).
You should think of the push notification registration like my I send the user push notifications. Not what kind of push notification can I send the user.
Then you need to do serverside filtering on you categories, like the ones in your example promo and news.
The perferance of the user should be stored on your server, so you will know what kind of notification to send to which user.

Is is possible for an application to handle the response from a push notification?

Is it possible to get the user's response from a push notification and create a notification reply? i.e. if a user clicks the view button and views the app, can we take that action and let the sender of the notification know that the receiver has viewed / opened the app?
Short answer, Yes.
When the application starts due to a user electing to from a notification (local or remote) the application is started in a special way so that the application can process the notification. At this point it can do whatever you want, like send a message back to your service.
See Handling Local and Remote Notifications for details.

iPhone Push Notification Reliablity

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.