Hi Rob, Currently this is how background notifications (content-available) should work on iOS, but on Android the notification doesn't start up the app only when the user 'touches' the notification is the app started. I think we could change this behaviour, for instance when you send a notification that doesn't contain any alert message. I think recently some more users have experimented with how to 'enable' background notifications on android. What do you think? p.s. I like your email address On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 6:59 PM, Rob Willett <rob.aerogear(a)robertwillett.com > wrote: > Hi, > > We’re trying to work out if the Aerogear Cordova push notification > *should* start the app if the app is not started. If the app is in > the > background than we get the notification but if the app is not started > up we > don’t *seem* to get anything happening. > > It seems to work OK when the app is in the foreground or background, > just > not when its not started up? > > Should it work when the app is not started on both iOS and Android? > > Thanks, > > Rob > > _______________________________________________ > Aerogear-users mailing list > Aerogear-users(a)lists.jboss.org > https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/aerogear-users > > -- Cheers, Erik Jan _______________________________________________ Aerogear-users mailing list Aerogear-users(a)lists.jboss.org https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/aerogear-users

Hi Rob, First of all let's be clear that the 'content-available' flag is a iOS implementation (part of the background fetch) and that it should start your app [1], but this is handled by the OS and there are some heuristics involved that is why you have to set the NewData [2]. So you can't be certain that it will 100% of the time, will start your app. For android we don't have any mechanism atm to enable background notifications, although I think we could add it. [1] https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UIKit/Reference/UIA... [2] https://aerogear.org/docs/guides/aerogear-cordova/AerogearCordovaPush/#_i... On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 9:36 AM, Rob Willett <rob.aerogear(a)robertwillett.com > wrote: > Erik, > > Our focus has been on iOS and I realise that I should have stated > this > in my mail message. Apologies. > > Currently IOS does not start our app when the iPhone receives an > AeroGear notification with content-available = 1 in it AND (the app > has > not been started OR is in the background). Basically we start the iOS > app, send a notification to check it works in the foreground. We then > swipe up to stop the app, send a new notification down, the new > notification is displayed BUT the AeroGear call back to handle the > notification is not called. If there is a a magic combination of > alert > and content-available flags to make this happen we’d be happy to > put > them in our code but we cannot see anything happening at all. We have > not checked Android for this behaviour, as for technical reasons we > <cough> I <cough> broke our last Nexus 5 phone on Friday and have not > replaced it yet. We’ll have a new one tomorrow. > > What we have to do at the moment is check to see if the app has > received > the silent notification as it will then make a callback to our > server, > if there has been no callback wishing 60 secs, our server sends a > full > notification with an alert in that is displayed by the device. The > downside to this method is that we lose the ability to clean out old > notifications using the silent notification AND a local cordova > plugin, > local-notifications. > > Our thinking is that both iOS and Android should start up in the > background when they receive a notification with an empty alert AND a > content-available = 1 flag AND the app is not running. We could use > Apple background-fetch to get 30 secs of processing and then shutdown > again. Unclear as to the system on Android. > > We have also now seen that Apple very aggressively moves Apps from a > background state to a suspended state after not very long, which also > means that the app doesn’t respond to content-available = 1 flags. > We > haven’t worked out how long this interval is, but its not hours. > This > actually underscores the importance of handling the content-available > = > 1 flag working when apps are suspended or not started. > > We are really starting to dislike Apples notification implementation. > > Rob > > The email address is list specific, we have our own mail servers so > its > easy to simply use specific emails which we can then track. Its easy > to > block as well if they get spammed. > > On 14 Dec 2015, at 8:15, Erik Jan de Wit wrote: > >> Hi Rob, >> >> Currently this is how background notifications (content-available) >> should >> work on iOS, but on Android the notification doesn't start up the >> app >> only >> when the user 'touches' the notification is the app started. I think >> we >> could change this behaviour, for instance when you send a >> notification >> that >> doesn't contain any alert message. I think recently some more users >> have >> experimented with how to 'enable' background notifications on >> android. >> What >> do you think? >> >> p.s. I like your email address >> >> On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 6:59 PM, Rob Willett >> <rob.aerogear(a)robertwillett.com >>> wrote: >> >>> Hi, >>> >>> We’re trying to work out if the Aerogear Cordova push >>> notification >>> *should* start the app if the app is not started. If the app is in >>> the >>> background than we get the notification but if the app is not >>> started >>> up we >>> don’t *seem* to get anything happening. >>> >>> It seems to work OK when the app is in the foreground or >>> background, >>> just >>> not when its not started up? >>> >>> Should it work when the app is not started on both iOS and Android? >>> >>> Thanks, >>> >>> Rob >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Aerogear-users mailing list >>> Aerogear-users(a)lists.jboss.org >>> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/aerogear-users >>> >>> >> >> >> -- >> Cheers, >> Erik Jan >> _______________________________________________ >> Aerogear-users mailing list >> Aerogear-users(a)lists.jboss.org >> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/aerogear-users > _______________________________________________ > Aerogear-users mailing list > Aerogear-users(a)lists.jboss.org > https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/aerogear-users > -- Cheers, Erik Jan _______________________________________________ Aerogear-users mailing list Aerogear-users(a)lists.jboss.org https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/aerogear-users

Yes it should also start your app when the app is not running or suspended, but it depends on heuristics of how much the user uses your app also something to keep in mind is that:

If the user rebooted his device and never launched the app since the reboot, the app will never wake up remotely and if the user killed the app manually from the app switcher, the app will also never wake up remotely.

I created a small app similar to your use-case where I do a http request when the content-available flag is set: onNotification: function(event) { if (event['content-available'] === 1) { ajax({ url: "http://192.168.0.30:8888/index.php", dataType: "text" }) .then( function( result ) { console.log(result); push.setContentAvailable(push.FetchResult.NewData); }); }

When I send a message with only content-available set like this: ~/w/t/background-fetch ❯❯❯ curl -u "73795055-123-462d-a6dd-4ad514c3afbf:123456-617f-47d4-a03b-f9ce89b7ec2b" \ -v -H "Accept: application/json" -H "Content-type: application/json" \ -X POST -d \'{"message": {"content-available" : true}}' \https://ups-me.rhcloud.com/ag-push/rest/sender It sometimes calls my server, but not always and sometimes takes some time to activate the app. Again this is something that apple implemented the app is woken up / started by the os and there is nothing we can do about this. You could also send a notification + content-available that way the notification can be used to start the app or if there was no network the app will react before the user 'touches' the app.