As the title says. We have a pretty specific need for our app, and I have an idea of how to achieve it, but would like input on whether it's good practice or not.
In communication apps such as Whatsapp or Discord, they need to send local notifications (and ideally update cached message data so it's fresh) anytime the user gets a new message. Conveniently for them, they control the backend, and so can just send out a silent push notification to the device(s) of user involved. In our case, we are creating a UI for someone else's backend, meaning we can't simply send a silent push on data change.
What we were originally thinking was a sort of crowd-source involving a combination of silent push and background refresh, but refresh won't work if the user closes the app. I've read all the given reasons for this, and though I still disagree, there isn't anything we can do about it. So what I'm now thinking is that, at whatever interval (say 1-3hrs) some serverless function sends a silent push to every single client, which will wake them up to make a fetch and compare to the cached data and send a local notification if necessary.
Downside here is it will likely incur some cost, and frankly it just feels kind of iffy as a solution, but I'm not sure what else we can do without controlling the backend API.
Thoughts? Is there anything I'm missing? Any better ideas?
Thanks in advance!
