Our app has some Crashlytics & Localytics reporting to collect metrics for diagnostic and info gathering.
One thing I'm noticing recently is that if a user has version m of the app installed and updates to version m+1, then for some users, the app has detected and reported that the push token obtained with version m+1 is different from that of version m (for the same handset).
That's fine - if the app has detected the change to the token it can send the new one to the server so the server can update.
But my question is - if the user didn't explicitly launch the app and thus present the app with the chance to send the new token to the server, then what will happen to the pushes sent by the server using the old token? Presumably they won't get delivered if the token has changed, but if the user has no need to launch the app then they're never going to receive any pushes from the server until they do launch the app. However there's not necessarily any reason why a user should repeatedly launch an app once it's been set up (depending upon what it does and how it delivers info to the user and how the user interacts with it, there's no reason why a user should have to launch the app after initial installation and launch).
If so then this seems like a gap in the design of push notifications? If they can change on the same handset, or another scenario is the user backs up their device to iCloud and then restores to a different handset, then in that case the push tokens will have definitely changed, yet any apps using push don't get the chance to send the new token to the server until the user launches the app, meanwhile all pushes from the server will be dropped.
