You (or Corrine) have correctly identified the pitfalls regarding background and foreground. There is one other case and thats when the app is not actually started up. We still want to send them notifications (at least for a while) alerting them to traffic issues. After a day or so, we’ll throttle back these notifications but at least for a few hours or a day, we need to send them out. We can’t use the content-available flag as the app isn’t running (in either bg or fg) to handle the flag. So we have to try to work out if the app is ‘alive’ or not, if the app is not alive we send down full-fat notifications, this means no content-available flag and full information to be displayed in the notification drawer.