AdHoc build receives no push notifications

Question

I am developing push notifications for an app of mine, I wrote the provider in PHP and it works fine. I was previously testing the push notifications with my dev builds and the sandbox server from Apple and everything worked fine, now I am trying to get it to work with an AdHoc build but I never receive any messages on the phone. Here is what I did:

• Enable production push notifications for the App, create the certificate, download it, create the PEM following the instructions here and upload it to my server. Configured my PHP Script to use gateway.push.apple.com and port 2195 for the connection and test it, the connection to the server works as expected.
• The Layout of the payload is the same as with the dev and writing to the stream works
• After activating Production APN I recreated my AdHoc provisioning profile and verified after the build that in the entitlements aps-environment is set to "production" (which it is)
• Installed the App through AdHoc on a device which has not run the app before, I get asked whether to allow PNs, click yes and my server receives the token just as it should.
• Tried to send a message (which should get send to 3 devices) through the production environment. There is no error when connecting to Apple or sending the data but I do not receive a push notification on any of the devices.

I am really out of ideas what could be wrong, does anybody have an idea? Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

Push certificates for production and development are different. And to make more difficult device tokens for production and sandbox are different for the same device. Cross check if these are correct and Im sure you must have faltered in this. To get device token in Production mode, write an alertview in AppDelegate didreceivenotifications event.

Once you get this token, you will know that it is different from dev token that we are generating which is why you were not able to send notification on PROD

Answer 2

I finally figured this out, the issue is that if you open a connection to the APNS and send over more than one push notification AND one of the tokens you submit is not a token valid for this certificate (eg. you send over a token that belongs to a dev instance whilst being connected with the production certificate) the APNS cancels the delivery of all the PNs that you sent in this batch. At least that is what I experienced so far, so make sure you always keep your dev and production tokens nicely separated :)

Answer 3

For distribution and release build always use production certificate.

Answer 4

I am struggling with the same issue. I believe the problem is that with adhoc builds, apple will only send notifications to them from the production apns server, try that.