I am building an app contains chat but i couldn't figure out somethings.
Notifications: I can send notifications to devices but they appear everytime (app in on screen or not) but i want to send "chat" notification only the chat page not open. I think i need to send data notifications instead of normal notifications.
Storing chats: I can't pull all the chats eveytime user wants to see messages. I need to store them and show only the new messages. How can i seperate them? Device has to say i have messages until this timestamp give me newer ones.
I am using firebase and gifted chat. I can give you any version codes if you want.
I know there are methods to check both iOS and Android to see if the user has locally disabled push notifications for an app, that is done within the app itself. But if a user disables push notifications for an app is this reported back to FCM? Does FCM know not to send a notification to that user and if so, is there anyway of pulling that info out of FCM.
The reason for this question is if the user hasn't used the app in a while and they disabled push notifications - without the user starting the app (thus getting updated tokens/checking for permissions) there is no way to know the user disabled push notifications - unless we can extract that from FCM.
And along these same lines, if a user has uninstalled the app, does FCM get updated that the token is now invalid due to app removal and removes it from its db - and if so, is there anyway to way to extract this from FCM?
In both cases, we need to either update our DB that the user has disabled push notifications (and possibly use alternate communication methods) or mark the user as 'uninstalled' and thus remove that user from any app communication method (fcm, sms, email).
I'm trying to understand what I will need to build on my server for Push notifications to work successfully.
My thoughts were:
The phone sends the notify URL to my server
The server stores the information in a Database
A separate process or PHP script will query the database and open continuous looping process for each device. (Each socket will be querying a 3rd party API)
When there is a change detected in the API for that device a push notification will be sent to the device's notify url.
Is this the right method on what needs to be done. Isn't this going to eat up server resources or is it the expected outcome of Push a push notifications server?
I've produced a simple diagram on all this below:
First of all, let's separate the process in the main stages needed for PUSH.
Device subscription.
Send the PUSH
Process the notification on device.
Subscription
For the subscription, your device (more specifically, your App) must call the PUSH api,for enabling PUSH notifications. This call to the push API will give you a URL that uniquely identify the device where your application is installed and running. You should store this URL on your database, the same way you store a user's email, or a user's phone number. No special black magic here. You only use it when you need to send a communication to a user.
Send the PUSH
For the push stuff, the same approach as for email, or SMS messaging here: "One does not simply make an infinite loop and send a message if any change is detected". What you have to do is, just send the PUSH message when your application needs to. So you have the user to which you want to send a message, instead of opening a SMTP connection to send ane mail, just build the PUSH XML Message and call the URL associated with that user. Some things to consider here are:
Network reliability (you need to retry if you can't connect to the server).
Response error code-handling (you don't need to retry if the server tells you that the phone has uninstalled your application, for example).
Scalability. You don't want to send a PUSH message from your PHP code, because you don't know how long it will take for the task to be completed. You have to make this thing asynchronously. So just queue up all the push messages, you can create a separate process (windows service, nodeJS service, cron job, daemon, etc.) to send the PUSH, handle retries and errors and clean the queue.
Process the notification on Device
So now that you are this far, you need to handle the notification on the phone. It depends on the type of PUSH notification that you are sending:
Tile. You will update the image, text and counter of the application tile, if the user has put your application to the start screen. On client side you need nothing to so, as all these parameters are part of your PUSH request.
Toast. This one requires a title, text (limited to some 35 characters more or less) and a relative URL inside of your APP. Your application will be launched (like when you click on a Toast notification from Twitter, for example) using the URI that you specify in the payload. So a bit of data can be already injected here. You may/or may not make a request to your server for new data. It is up to you.
Raw. This one is pretty much silent. Is not seen by the user if your APP is not running. As you might guess, this kind of PUSH is useful to live update your running APP, instead of continuously polling your server, wasting user battery and bandwidth and wasting your server resources. You can send anything (raw bytes or strings) up to the max size of the payload allowed my Microsoft.
If yo have any more questions, don't hesitate to ask.
Bottom line: separate the PUSH sending, make it async, don't you ever forget that...
Your PHP script that continually pings the database for changes...THAT is what will eat up your system resources. Push notifications go hand in hand with Event Driven Programming. This means that ideally, your code shouldn't continuously ping your DB. Rather, when something happens (ie, an "event"), THEN your code does something...like contact your phone via push notification.
Your steps for push notifications are more or less correct, but are incomplete. Step 4: the server contacts the client via the notify url (which you have). Step 5 is that the client then contacts the server to actually pull down the information it needs. That is: The new information is not provided to the client via the notify url. Once the client has its new information, then the program continues as normal (populates a list, downloads skynet, etc.)
Your third step is very wasteful and not practical if your app is installed on more than a few devices.
Instead, each device should be subscribed to types of server updates it cares about. Your server's DB will have a mapping from each type of update you support to the list of notification channel URLs of devices that care about this update type.
When your server detects an update of type X, it would send a notification to all devices subscribed to that type of update.
I have a scenario presented by business team that: one person has device and he subscribed for Push Notification, later on his wife use the same device and subscribe for Push on her account.
Now in this case:
will Push go two times to the same device?
Or, the previous device subscription will be overridden
Plus, my App saves all Push notification messages on user's devices (as transaction history) , shouldn't be the problem!
To handle this scenario, what could be the possible options?
I am using Worklight Consumer 5.0.5
Thanks
Once you subscribe with different user on a same device the old subscription will be deleted. This is done for security reasons, e.g. in case you sell/loose/give your device new user should not get notifications of old one.
I want to collect device attributes and send them to the mdm server using push notification.
Steps involved are:
create a configuration profile with mdm payload
get device token
use apple push notification service to send a notification to the device.
get back device attributes
do same with multiple devices which the company manages
Questions:
Will the user always need to act on a message or I can send a message onto the device without user action and get the work done?
Do I need an app on the device to send back the token?
It sounds like you're trying to use push notifications to poll iOS devices and return information.
Push notifications do not provide a mechanism to execute code on a device without user interaction. You would have to have an application loaded on the device, and the user would have to click through from the notification to your app.
In iOS, applications generally don't run unless the user is actively interacting with them. There are a few exceptions (e.g. background audio.)
You do need to have an app running to get the device token. You call registerForRemoteNotificationTypes. See APNs docs for more information.
Edited to add more information:
Looks like the MDM protocol uses push notifications to do just what you describe. However, there's nothing about it in Apple's "Local and Push Notification Programming Guide" (linked above).
Apparently Apple keeps tight control over the MDM documentation (see here and here).
However, I did find this paper from blackhat describing how the system works.
My earlier point about not executing arbitrary code on a device without user interaction still applies. There's a finite set of commands that can be executed (see Appendix A).
I came across this question when searching for iOS push notification access payload without user interaction - Just want to add that, in iOS 7 and above, it is possible to send silent push notifications to app, and app can process them without user interaction.
However, I've also found some discussions saying that the silent push notifications are not delivered reliably, in this SO post. That's why I'm still looking for alternate ways to retrieve payloads of the normal remote push notifications. Doesn't look like there's a way.