I heard that push notification is not reliable. What could be the alternative for this?
The use case I am trying to handle is:
1. I have a app which will be shared by three kind of groups. Each group contains certain set of persons.
2. A request is submitted by first kind of group and it will be serviced by second kind of group. So, all persons who are part of second group should be notified and no one apart from them should get the notification.
3. Similarly, A request is submitted by first kind of group and it will be serviced by third kind of group. So, all persons who are part of third group should be notified and no one apart from them should get the notification.
4. Even second group persons can submit a request to third group.
Please provide your thoughts as how should I handle these scenarios.
Push notifications rely on the network (3G/WiFi) presence to deliver the notification. Also, there is no response back from the Apple Push Notification Server which guarantee the delivery of the notification. Having said all these things... iPod touch is higly unreliable for delivery of notification because one, it do not have 3G; second, for saving battery its notifications are internally turned off for some time....
One Alternative to this is to keep polling the server in a background thread for any modification. But this will work only when app is running.
Another Alternative can be writing our own APNS kinda infrastructure.
you're right to say Push Notifications are not reliable.
For one thing, if the device is not connected to the internet, APNs only keeps one push notification to be sent when the device connects again (the last notification sent from the provider). Since there's no way to determine if a notification has been already sent or not after your servers sent them to APNS, you can't even try to queue the notifications on your end.
Other than that if your app depends on PN the user can easily break it's functionality by turning notifications off.
So you're absolutely right, if the data you want to send is critical, then you shouldn't use Push Notification. But I believe there's really no solution to your problem. you simply can't rely on them for your app to work.
I think the best approach would be like the email app for example, where you can download your emails when you start the app wether you have PN turned on or not, and the PN just notify you of new email, even though it's not guaranteed you'll get it at all.
There is no alternative, since Apple does some very low level communication. You would need to work together with the mobile providers to build something like the notification services.
That said, I don't think the service is not reliable. Maybe you should check your implementation.
You are right that APNs does not guarantee delivery: From their docs, they say that:
Important: Because delivery is not guaranteed, you should not depend
on the remote-notifications facility for delivering critical data to
an application via the payload. And never include sensitive data in
the payload. You should use it only to notify the user that new data
is available.
Related
In didReceiveRemoteNotification, is it possible to see if there are other/older push notifications that haven't been responded to?
I have a scenario where each notification contains different data, and unless you exit app and select every single notification for your app. You app wont be able to get to that data.
I'm thinking that iOS must be storing that information in an array somewhere, but haven't been able to find anything through Google.
Advice please? Last chance saloon would be re-writing it to poll a server for notifications.
You cannot guarantee that your app will ever receive any push notification sent to it. The only way it does is if it is running when it receives the message or if the notification is used to launch your app.
I would recommend implementing a web service on your server that allows your app to pull down the data it needs from these notifications when it is running.
I saved users' device tokens in database.
At the time to push notifications,I loaded all device tokens from database,then in a loop,I send push message to one user one time.
Now there are about 300 thousands users,I want to know,is there any other better way?
Thanks
There is no better way with Apple. You need to send the same message to each device token. Services like Parse.com will mask this behind the scenes dirty work for you by letting you broadcast to groups of devices, however you still need to subscribe each device token to the group initially...
So, to answer your question, no there is no better way, you must loop and send to all device tokens :(.
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 we can maintain push notification for hundreds of devices? do we need to maintain a database on server or apple will maintain this,we just need to send payload.also i'm confusing in this matter that how do i cancel already sent payload...does someone knows about it?
You need to maintain your own database. The payload that you send to Apple includes the device token of the iphone you are sending the message to. Your table could contain as simple as an id for the user (auto-generated id, or email, or whatever you need), mapped to the iphone deviceToken, along with other columns and tables that you need for your book-keeping. The device token can be stored as String for simplicity, but it's really a 32-byte BLOB.
Once you send a payload, you cannot cancel or check its status. Once you send it, it's out of your hands.
I'd head on over to Urban Airship and play around with their implementation of Apple Push Notifications. They have a sample PHP application you can extend to fit your need and great step-by-step documentation on how to get your sample application up and running.
No, there is no way of canceling sent payload.
how do i send device token from my native iphone app with a specific timer request so that after the specified time push notification alert comes to device.
The title of your question and the text of it don't exactly match.
The easiest way to set up a timer request for push is to sign up with a push service provider that offers timed requests (UrbanAirship does but you may also want to check others like iLime or push.io).
The other option is to write a server where you can queue the requests then run a cron job to push them out. Obviously, that'll take more work. To actually post the message, you could use something like ASIHTTPRequest.
You may also want to tell your users not to rely on exact timing. A lot of variables enter into the process especially if user is on WiFi.