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
Related
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...
Is it true that we can use any component for our own server component? I mean it can be a Java or C# TCP/IP client which connects with Apple servers to push notifications. This can also be a console application, is that right?
Also, is it right that we have to push notifications for APN server, with each and every deviceTokens registered on our own server?
You can use whatever language you want and you will have to send push notifications for every registered device token. You should also investigate apple's feedback API's which you should periodically check to see which of your devices are no longer registered because sending a push has no feedback and you will not know if it is being received or not. If you use a service such as Urban Airship the setup will be much much easier to start and they have helpful API's to give them a group of device tokens or to do a mass push to all registered device tokens.
You are right on both accounts. You can write your own method to send it, and you must send it to each device id.
framework that might help you:
http://www.easyapns.com/
as far as I understand APN's I can only send them to the app not a specific user that uses my app.
Is there a way of sending APN's only to specific users that use my app? I can't think of a way of doing this...
Greetz
APNS is not a broadcast medium. As it says in the documentation:
Apple Push Notification service transports and routes a notification
from a given provider to a given device.
When you send a notification from the server, one of the paramters is the device ID.
Apple's Push Notifications are always sent to specific 'users' (a specific device being an iphone, ipad)
What you do when you want to use APN is register the application for push notifications. Then you get a token that links the user's device to the notification service. You then use this token to 'push notifications' to APN which will in turn send a notification to that device. Notifications are pushed by 'Providers'.
Here's apple's documentation on the matter: Apple Push Notifications
Look up 'Registering for Remote Notifications' to register the device
and 'Handling Local and Remote Notifications' to handle the incoming notifications.
Read up on how to send notifications here: Providers
It is possible. I use Easy APNS and in newMessage() you can specify the PID (saved in a MySQL database) of the user.
Have a look at http://www.easyapns.com/
I want to ask you guys
How device receives push notification?
Is our device continuously connected to apple's server?
Many Thanks,
Nav
Device does not remain connected. In fact the app might not even be running any more.
The mechanism is as follows:
Your application has to register for notifications.
When it registers you get a token, which you send to your server.
When you wish to send a push notification, your server connects to Apple server and sends a message to the previously registered token.
Simple :)
For more details see:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/RemoteNotificationsPG/ApplePushService/ApplePushService.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40008194-CH100-SW9
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.