APNS always returning "discarded as device was offline"

Question

Created 2w

Replies 3

Boosts 0

Participants 2

Approx Dec 13th 2025 til now (Dec 29th) I noticed my APNS dropped off to nothing daily. When I try to send APNS alerts on the developer site tool it always returns "discarded as device was offline" for multiple devices which I know are online.

When I try pushing through my VPS (as I always have without any code changes for months) I get status codes of 400 and 403 mostly and a few 200's without it delivering also.

I created a new sandbox certificate just in case it was that but still no luck, I get the same results. Ive checked for any firewall issues and I see the following on my VPS:

nslookup gateway.push.apple.com Server: 1.1.1.1 Address: 1.1.1.1#53

** server can't find gateway.push.apple.com: NXDOMAIN

This seems like a second issue but not the primary issue that the portal is reporting.

Any ideas what to check? Im at a loss as to why its not working at all through apples test notification portal on my developer account. It seems thats the initial issue I need to solve.

Thank you for any ideas/help

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Answer 1

Engineer OP

Apple

1w

gateway.push.apple.com is the legacy APNs endpoint which has been shutdown earlier in 2025.

So, if that's the endpoint you are using your notifications will not work at all. But it would have stopped working back in the spring, not on December 13th.

But in any case, if that is indeed the endpoint you are using, you need to update your push servers to use the new HTTP/2 protocol and the new endpoints.

You can read more about the new APNs Provider API here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/setting_up_a_remote_notification_server/sending_notification_requests_to_apns/

If you have issues after migrating to the new interface, or have technical questions about the migration, we are happy to help troubleshoot your push requests once you have started using the HTTP/2 protocol. Please understand that we are unable to help with the specifics of your server side implementation. Unfortunately we also cannot make recommendations on which 3rd party resources to use to make this transition.

Argun Tekant /  DTS Engineer / Core Technologies

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Answer 2

gpstrack OP

21h

It turns out that only one of the devices was offline (The notifications were turned off) but it appeared to report multiple devices the same way.

After that, I also noticed after I created that new APNS Key (for Sandbox & Production) I was still getting fails when sending to https:

api.sandbox.push.apple.com
api.push.apple.com

But when I send them to:

api.development.push.apple.com

They appear to work correctly. I have no idea what first caused the issue and it also seems like I have some other issues still occuring.

alert
background

Some alert types work some dont. some background types work, some dont.

Very odd. Im still trying to figure out why things changed outside my control. And yes Ive been using HTTP/2 for a while now.

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Answer 3

gpstrack OP

21h

Also sending the device token that my device registers with Apple (via the Apple test notifications page) tells me that the device token is invalid yet when I send it to api.development.push.apple.com it returns status 200. Im not sure why Im seeing so many inconsistencies since December.

0