CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidiospush-notificationapple-push-notificationspusher
Rakib
Rakib

Reputation: 13085

Can Pusher messages be received on Android/iOS app when the app is closed or phone is turned off

Can Pusher messages be received on Android/iOS app when the app is closed or the phone is turned off?

What i expect to happen...

  1. When phone is on & app is on, it's pretty straight forward from the Pusher docs on how to react to pusher messages sent to the app.

  2. When phone is on & app is closed, the phone should receive a notification that something has been sent to the app.

  3. When phone is turned off, a notification should be received by the phone when it's turned back on to notify that something has been sent to the app.

Are these even possible? If yes, what are some suggestions to lookout for? If no, what can be some workaround?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 3328

Answers (1)

leggetter
leggetter

Reputation: 15467

When an application using Pusher moves into the background on iOS and Android the connection to Pusher will likely stay active for a few minutes. But eventually that connection will be closed. You can't stop that happening within your application (although there may be a "hack" around stating your app is a Voice app when submitting to the Apps store).

Therefore, you should monitor your application moving to the background and put a fallback in place to delivery messages to the phone when it's not connected.

Please see How get pusher events when the iOS app go to the background? for libPusher (the Pusher iOS library).

Here's an extract from the Android Processes & Threads Lifecycle docs on a "Service Process":

A process that is running a service that has been started with the startService() method and does not fall into either of the two higher categories. Although service processes are not directly tied to anything the user sees, they are generally doing things that the user cares about (such as playing music in the background or downloading data on the network), so the system keeps them running unless there's not enough memory to retain them along with all foreground and visible processes.

So, running a Pusher instance in such a thread is a viable option.

However, there will still be occasions where the user goes offline. In that situation your server you can detect if a user is online by querying the Pusher HTTP API or by using WebHooks where your server can be instantly informed if the user has gone offline or come back online.

Using the mechanisms above you can facilitate smart notifications; if the user is online (the app is in the foreground) then send the message to them by Pusher, if they are offline (the app is in the background) then use an alternative mechanism for delivery (native Push Notification, SMS or email).

Upvotes: 6

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