[Aerogear-users] Should the cordova push plugin start the App up if its not started?

Rob Willett rob.aerogear at robertwillett.com
Mon Dec 14 03:36:45 EST 2015


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 at 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 at lists.jboss.org
>> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/aerogear-users
>>
>>
>
>
> -- 
> Cheers,
>     Erik Jan
> _______________________________________________
> Aerogear-users mailing list
> Aerogear-users at lists.jboss.org
> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/aerogear-users


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