I have a newsstand app that will offer a free subscription that updates daily.
I would like to use push notifications to download the issues in the background.
At first I was considering use UrbanAirship to manage the list of scribers and send out push notifications every day at the same time. Of course this is costly.
Instead would Apple allow me to send local notifications to the app each day at the scheduled time and then the app could go and download the issue in the background, thus avoiding the need for a server to send push notifications or manage a list of scribers or worry about security and certificates etc.
I am not sure about Apple's guideline for this. But I strongly recommend to not try out something like that.
In case your app is not running (not in background) the local notification will not start the download automatically. The Newsstand push notification include the content-available property (with a value of 1) in the JSON payload. Due to this iOS launch your application in background (if not in background) and you can add your content in Newsstand queue for download in background. Once download is complete iOS will close your application. There is no notification alert or any other thing comes which require user to take any action. I think this you cannot achieve through Local Notification.
Other challenges
- How do you make sure the new content is always available when local notification is received .
- How do you figure out what content to download.
Also check out my answer to this question.
Related
Regarding push notifications. How do I get the provision from APNS to implement push notifications in to my application. Help me guys.
start from these series
http://www.raywenderlich.com/3443/apple-push-notification-services-tutorial-part-12
iOS developers love to imagine users of their awesome app using the app all day, every day. Unfortunately, the cold hard truth is that users will sometimes have to close the app and perform other activities. Laundry doesn’t fold itself, you know :]
Happily, push notifications allow developers to reach users and perform small tasks even when users aren’t actively using an app!
Push notifications have become more and more powerful since they were first introduced. In iOS 9, push notifications can:
Display a short text message
Play a notification sound
Set a badge number on the app’s icon
Provide actions the user can take without opening the app
Be silent, allowing the app to wake up in the background and perform a task
This push notifications tutorial will go over how push notifications work, and let you try out their features...
I followed the steps mentioned in raywenderlich tutorial. It's some what easy to send Push notifications to my iPhone app by using my system as the temporary server(ie, sending the message by running the PHP code from the Terminal window).
But, while going for production and dynamic messages for different users at different time, it's very tough for me to set the service in a server.
So, I go with third party server to send Push Notifications. - Parse.com
Tutorial for how to use that API.
Documentation about the installations of the application.
Here, we have a tag parse.com for questions about this process.
I'm wondering if there is any way of retrieving the last-received push notification if the app is launched from the home screen instead of by pressing the 'View' button on the notification.
The app we're writing is for dealing with sensitive data, and it's important to be able for the central server to be able to remotely disable a client at will, without having the requirement that the app needs an internet connection to launch.
The basic idea I came up for this would be to send a push notification with a custom payload letting the app know to disable itself until it can properly sync its data.
This would work if the user pressed View on the notification, but not if they cancelled it and then launched the app separately.
I'd love to know if this is possible, or otherwise if there's a better way to implement this functionality.
It's not possible. Your app would have to connect to the server on launch and get its latest status from there. If your use case is that sensitive, push notifications are probably not reliable enough anyway because Apple does not guarantee that a push notification will actually be delivered.
Like Ole said, not possible.
Note that you shouldn't be relying on push notifications for anything like this. From Apple's push notifications programming guide:
Remember that delivery of notifications is “best effort” and is not guaranteed.
i m making an application where data is accesed from website and displayed with an application.i have made an action which will tell the user that new data has arrived.this will work properly if the application is open .but if the application is closed than ,is there any way to tell the user that new data has arrived ,,so that he can open the application and check the data?
If you are using the Apple Push Notification Service (APNs), your messages will be delivered whether the application is running or not. For information on how to control what information is presented to the user, read the Apple Push Notification Programming Guide.
You should use Apple Push Notification Service, like codelark said.
I would recommend looking into Urban Airship for help getting started. It's a third party service, but it makes things much easier. Urban Airship does have their own tutorials and code samples which may be easier than Apple's.
As a follow up to the reference to apple push notification, as of ios4.0 I believe you, you may have a few more options, 1) you can send local notifications (just like push notifications, but they originate from inside your app) that could be timed to be delivered even if the app is not running..assuming you know approximately how long it will take for data to arrive. 2) if your data update will occur soon after the app closed.. your app can request a certain amount of time to complete an operation (even though the user has closed the app) and wait for the data, then send a local notification to tell the person to come back into the app. 3) if your functions based on gps updates, music streaming, or voip you can set a flag so your app continues to run in the background
sorry for the unstructuredness of the answer, this was just off the top of my head, hope it helps
I'm looking for a way to get real time notification from a server in an iPhone App. I don't want to use Apple Push Notification as I have many notifications. My web service is coded in PHP, and I haven't figured out an easy way to implement this functionnality. Any idea what should I do?
Thx a lot for your help!
EDIT : I'm looking for a way to get notification only when the app is launched (otherwise, the only option IS Apple Push not.).
If the app is running you can open an http connection from the app to the server and have the server hold it open, pushing data through it when you want. This is basically how COMET works.
This will only work while your app is running. If you need the notification to happen even if the user has closed the app then Apple Push Notifications are your only option.
You must use Apple Push Notification for achieving push notifications cycle on Apple's mobile devices.
My app should post some message to Twitter at the end of each day at the time X. App might not be running at this time X, but it still has to post that message. I don't want to bother user by everyday asking to do this task.
Can I use Push Notification to silently (without any alert view popup, sound or anything else) do some task in my app in some constant time everyday even if it's not running?
thx
There are three 'notification' mechanisms you can send via push: alerts, sounds, and badge values. The way the push notification works is that on the phone it launches the app and hands over the 'push payload' to it with those values. Even if you turn off all three mechanisms, the OS will still have to launch your app each time, which means the user will get interrupted.
In short, you can't have a push happen silently. I doubt, from a user-experience point of view that Apple will allow things to happen on the phone without the user getting notified somehow.
No.
You can't schedule things to be run by your app on a non-jailbroken iPhone.
The only solution is to have a separately hosted service somewhere to which you push details from your app and that runs the scheduled updates on your behalf.
To do so silently is not up to you. The iPhone device has a configuration in which each app with a Push mechanism has settings where one can specify if they want alerts or not. If set to yes, the text of the alert is displayed as well.
sounds like you are trying to "wake up" your app at a specific time each day to perform some type of task. from what i understand about the iPhone this is not possible. you cannot create a cron job or something that will fire on a time you specify. you can run this on the server side and then push a notification to the user telling them that the message has been posted to twitter.
if you are on a jailbroken phone i feel confident that there is some way to do this.
Given that push notification requires that your server send a notification, why not skip a step and have the server just send the update directly to Twitter on the user's behalf? You can't use push notification to trigger an automatic task on the iPhone like you're asking - the user must take the step of accepting the notification for anything to happen.
if you really want to do it from the phone, you can just declare a "long term" background task should be covered around here (iphone app programing guide) some where..., that way you never go sleep, and you can do what ever you like... :)