I am trying to issue the "start" APNs push notification to start a live activity for my iOS app. The notification appears to send correctly, there is no error message, but the live activity never appears for any of my users (users are in TestFlight).
In addition to issuing the APNs commands from my server, I have also tried using the CloudKit Push Notification Console to manually generate a "start" notification. It submits correctly but the live activity never starts.
I have also checked the Console app to watch the device logs and see if iOS is rejecting/throttling the live activity but I don't see any activity related to the start message at all.
Here are some details:
App bundle ID: `com.penzu.moodmoji`
APNs topic: `com.penzu.moodmoji.push-type.liveactivity`
APNs push type: `liveactivity`
Recent apns-id: `7b633309-b7fd-4163-b620-776efa04f315`
APNs payload:
{
"aps": {
"timestamp": 1742651625,
"event": "start",
"content-state": {
"totalDays": 7,
"currentDay": 2,
"progress": 0.29,
"status": "ACTIVE",
"reportReady": false
},
"attributes-type": "GoalActivityAttributes",
"attributes": {
"totalDays": 7,
"currentDay": 2,
"progress": 0.29,
"status": "ACTIVE",
"reportReady": false
},
"alert": {
"title": "It's day 2!",
"body": "Don't forget to record every time you feel anxious today."
}
}
}
I can confirm that LiveActivities started by the iOS app with ActivityKit work correctly, and the app does appear to be receiving pushToStartTokenUpdates:
struct GoalActivityAttributes: ActivityAttributes, Sendable {
struct ContentState: Codable & Hashable, Sendable {
let totalDays: Int
let currentDay: Int
let progress: Double
let status: String
let reportReady: Bool
}
let goal: SimpleGoal
}
for await nextStartToken in Activity<GoalActivityAttributes>.pushToStartTokenUpdates {
// send nextStartToken to server...
}
The app I'm testing with is in TestFlight, using the production APNs environment.
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I am an iOS development engineer. Recently, I updated the Xcode version to 16.1 (16B40) and updated my debugging device (iPhone 15) to iOS 18.1.1. However, I found that I could not respond to the delegate method.
I confirmed that my code, certificate, Xcode settings, and network environment had not changed. Simply executing
application.registerForRemoteNotifications()
in
func application(_ application: UIApplication, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: [UIApplication.LaunchOptionsKey: Any]?) -> Bool
did not receive a response(didRegisterForRemoteNotificationsWithDeviceToken or didFailToRegisterForRemoteNotificationsWithError ).
In the same environment, when I switched to another device for debugging (iOS 17.0.3), the delegate method would respond.
I really don't know what to do, I hope someone can help me, I would be very grateful.
Please note: Everything is normal when using devices before iOS 18.1.1 version
I tried below at 2:00 PM on 21/01/2025(JST).
Apple Push Notification service server certificate update
I followed above,
a new server certificate: "SHA-2 Root : USERTrust RSA Certification Authority certificate" was added to my push server, but a certificate error occurred and push notifications could not be sent.
So I refered this article,Instead of connecting via DNS name resolution at api.development.push.apple.com,
I fixed api.development.push.apple.com to "17.188.143.34" in /etc/hosts,
I could push notifications with the new server certificate.
(I got this IP(17.188.143.34) from this airtcle)
From this, I suspect that Apple had not yet updated the APNs certificate (CA) for the Sandbox environment as of 2:00 PM on January 21, 2025 (JST).
Was the update published as scheduled?
Topic:
App & System Services
SubTopic:
Notifications
Tags:
APNS
User Notifications
PushKit
Push To Talk
Hello, I'm from Microsoft team maintaining push notification api behind Teams platform.
We are experiencing strange and short error spikes towards APNS that seem to mostly correlate worldwide. We checked the networking and push request code but could not find what could be causing this. These error spikes are all timeouts or connection resets (by remote host, ie. APNS servers) and seem to come and go randomly:
Would it be possible to check this for outages or some other metrics on your side or investigate why would it happen? Since it's worldwide it seems unlikely it's something broken on our side. We are using the standard APNS http2 endpoint with modern support for all RFC features (so everything should work normally).
Mind you, our api might be in a unique position because of the volume of notifications (in the billions per day).
Hello everyone.
I'm trying to add a lifetime for push notifications via apns-expiration for my application.
With the Internet turned on, push notifications come, that's ok.
With the Internet turned off, as I noticed, only the last push with the badge installation on the application icon comes.
That is, the logic is that a text push with text is sent, then after N time the next push to the same device with the badge installation.
I would like to receive a text push after turning on the Internet.
Topic:
App & System Services
SubTopic:
Notifications
We are in the process of transferring our app to a new Apple Developer Organization account. Our app uses the Apple Push Notification service (APNs) with a .p8 authentication key configured on our server to send push notifications.
We would like to confirm:
Once the app transfer is completed, will push notifications continue to work temporarily using the existing .p8 key on our server, until we generate and configure a new .p8 key under the new organization's account?
Understanding this behavior is critical for us to ensure a smooth transition and avoid any disruption in push notification delivery for our users.
Thank you for your guidance and support.
As you announced at this link https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/766788, 'APNs will update the server certificates in sandbox on January 20, 2025, and in production on February 24, 2025.' I guess you have updated the sandbox certificate. What can we do to test whether we have correctly updated our application’s Trust Store to include the new server certificate.We test on a server that haven't updated the new server certificate, connect your sandbox environment 'api.sandbox.push.apple.com' to send notifications, it succeed. As I guess, it should failed.
Hi, am facing an issue related to voip push notifications getting delivered 1-2 hours after apns-expiration to 0 and apns-priority to 10.
I had raised a similar post got a reply that it may be due to network delay.
But network delay can cause the delivery of voip push to be delayed only by few seconds or minutes. But in our case voip push is getting delivered hours after the voip call was attempted.
Steps to reproduce:
Put our voip app in background and lock iPhone. As app is put in background, socket connections gets disconnected from server.
Now if a caller makes call to this app, the call should be delivered through voip push.
2) Voip push should ideally be received even if app is in background and iPhone is locked. It is connected to a good wifi network. But it does not receive the voip push.
3) After 1-2 hours user unlocks iPhone and opens voip app. As soon as user opens app, the voip push is received and phone starts ringing.
Hi) we have two ios apps in same Firebase project - with different apple bundle ids. One of them had connected APNS with Firebase and everything had worked perfectly - push notifications where delivered every time. But recently we occationaly put same APNS to other our Firebase's ios app and as result we lost all pushes - on both app. After deletion APNS from both of them and reconnecting APNS to app with proper apple bundle id push notifications didn't start to work.
could you please suggest what we are suppose to do to resolve issue?
Back story: I'm developing an app that communicates with a personal medical device. We use critical alerts when we have hardware issues that could result in harm to the patient. The audio file is a 30 second file to make sure the patient is aware. If the app is open when they occur, we pop up a modal message in the app. When the user dismisses the notice, we call UNNotificationCenter::removeDeliveredNotifications(withIdentifiers:) to remove the critical alert and also to stop the audio file that is playing.
This normally works fine. However we discovered that if the patient leaves critical alert enabled but disables notifications for our app, that we can still post the critical alert and it goes off. However when the user dismisses the message, the removeDeliveredNotifications call does not work. I did some debugging and if call getDeliveredNotifications with this permission combination, it return 0 (normally it would return 1).
Does anyone know of another way to remove the critical alert in this situation? (or should I be submitting this as a bug?)
Hey Together,
I have seen that critical notifications need to be confirmed by apple to be used.
Sadly I couldn't figure out where to ask for that.
Context: I have a sports tournament app for Beach Handball. There are a couple of Courts like up to 20-25. The main use for that in my app would be to notify first aiders/Medics. Right now they are called in via Speakers or by the referees just writing that into a WhatsApp chat. As this takes a long time and the speakers can be deactivated due to rain, power shortage or even the medics sometimes are not in range to exactly hear the speakers calling them.
To Speed up this process I want them to download the App, Register via an E-Mail or a One Time Code. Now if a referee needs immediate Help from the Medics on their court they can send the Critical alert to the Medics without having to write a chat into a WhatsApp group, to get a call through the speakers 10 minutes later which the medics may not even hear.
A couple of weeks ago we had a player falling on her back/neck/head and they couldn't figure out if she broke her neck or not. Luckily the medics were right next to the court and saw that. but what would happen if they were a couple hundred of meters away and did not notice that? I mean the PA system was off due to a power shortage. someone trying to move her? Risking her death?
And while we are at it we could add those notifications if a team is missing to a court for a game that already should've started. Critical because it is urgent. Those notifications are handled with care.
I'm encountering an issue with our legacy Objective-C codebase that uses UIApplicationDelegate.
Here are the steps to reproduce the issue:
Uninstall the application from the device.
Install and launch the application.
As part of the launch event, the client requests notification permission.
The permission prompt is still displayed, even though the client receives a remote notification token (which appears to be a cached one).
I followed the same steps with a sample app built with Swift (SwiftUI), and this issue did not occur. In the Swift app, I consistently received a delegate<didRegisterForRemoteNotificationsWithDeviceToken> call after the user allowed the notification permission.
Could you please provide some insights into why this might be happening with only our client?
Topic:
App & System Services
SubTopic:
Notifications
Tags:
APNS
iOS
Notification Center
User Notifications
The following issue has occurred:
Push notifications are not being received on certain devices.
What could be the possible causes?
Push notifications are being sent from our own server, and we are receiving normal responses from APNs.
Users have confirmed that notifications are enabled on their devices, and they report no network issues.
This problem is occurring for multiple users.
I’m using Appnotic from my server to send notifications for an emergency service, where it is critical that notifications are delivered immediately.
My payload looks like this:
"aps": {
"alert": "Test alert",
"sound": {
"critical": 1,
"name": "sound.wav",
"volume": 0.5
},
"content-available": 1,
"category": "alert"
},
"topic": "com.fireservicerota.FSR-Primary-Alerting",
"custom_payload": {
"id": "11",
"type": "alert",
"incident_id": 23434,
"incident_response_id": 2652343,
"expiration_time": "2024-06-06T16:59:05+01:00"
}
}
I already have the critical alert entitlement and background processing enabled. Everything seems fine when debugging, but I’m experiencing issues:
• Some notifications never arrive
• Around 60% of notifications arrive with noticeable delay
Since this is an emergency app, delivery speed is crucial. What could be causing this inconsistency?
Hi all,
We encountered an issue where APNs (Apple Push Notification service) push messages cannot be received during development. The specific description is as follows:
Our app runs on an iPad that connects to the cellular network using a SIM card and accesses the Internet through the company's MDM, which provides APN setting proxies.
During operation, we found that the device fails to receive push messages from APNs. Network packet capture revealed that the connection attempt by apsd to port 5223 failed. According to Apple's documentation (https://support.apple.com/zh-cn/102266), when port 5223 cannot be connected to, it will fall back to port 443 and use a proxy. However, our packet capture showed that when port 5223 was unreachable, the apsd service on the iPad did not attempt to establish a connection to port 443.
Since the iPad device currently cannot establish a connection with APNs, it consistently fails to receive push messages from APNs. We tried disconnecting the SIM card and using a Wi-Fi environment, and in this case, the iPad device was able to receive push messages from APNs normally.
Could you advise us on how to proceed with troubleshooting in this situation?
Topic:
App & System Services
SubTopic:
Notifications
Hello,
I am building a swift macOS app and have noticed issues today with delivering APN's to both development and production devices. Similar to this thread the only way I can get them to deliver temporarily is to do one of:
Change the bundle ID of my app to a new bundle ID, then start it up. I will usually get the first notification.
Reset my network (either wired ethernet or wifi, typically both)
Using the push notifications console for development sends, I see the message "discarded as device was offline" in the delivery log even though the device is still online and was just registered when I got back the deviceToken.
If I set an expiration on development notifications then the delivery log says "stored for device power considerations" and the notification will then send once I do one of the above steps (new bundle or reset network).
Previous to today the notifications were sending immediately and I had no issues getting them. Is there something I can do to fix this problem, is it a problem with the APN provider, or is it something else I haven't thought of?
A unique ID for an expiration-based notification is 1755def8-1a44-cbcf-c64b-64e435c30f81, and a non-expiry is d7a72b46-0c64-4500-0abc-3734f9efbd90.
Hello everyone,
Our team is currently developing a PTT (Push-to-Talk) application using the officially recommended PushToTalk framework. During development, we've encountered a point of confusion regarding the application's behavior after being force-quit by the user.
Based on our understanding of the PushToTalk framework documentation (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/pushtotalk/creating-a-push-to-talk-app/) and the PTChannelManager session restoration mechanism, when a user manually kills the app from the background (App Switcher), the current PTT session (the system session managed by PTChannelManager) should terminate. Subsequent pushtotalk type pushes sent via APNS, without an active session, appear to be silently discarded by the system and cannot wake the app for processing (similar to what Kevin Elliott DTS mentioned in https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/760506 Point D). This seems to prevent reliable PTT message reception in our app after a user force quits.
However, we've observed that some popular PTT applications on the market (e.g., TenTen) appear to successfully receive and play PTT voice messages from friends even after the user has performed a force-quit action. This behavior seems inconsistent with our test results and understanding based on the standard framework, posing a challenge for us in providing similar reliability using standard methods.
This naturally leads us to wonder how this capability is achieved. We've reviewed developer forums and are aware of the historical existence of a PTT-specific com.apple.developer.pushkit.unrestricted-voip entitlement, which allowed PushKit usage for PTT without CallKit binding. While Apple DTS engineers have repeatedly stated this entitlement is being deprecated and urged migration to the PushToTalk framework (e.g., https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/763289), we are curious if the observed "wake-after-force-quit" capability might be related to some apps potentially still utilizing this outgoing special entitlement. Alternatively, is there perhaps a mechanism within the standard PushToTalk framework that allows wake-up after force quit that we haven't fully grasped?
Therefore, we'd like to ask fellow developers for clarification and discussion:
When using the standard PushToTalk framework, have others confirmed that the app indeed cannot be woken up by pushtotalk pushes after being force-quit by the user? Is this the expected behavior?
Has anyone successfully achieved a TenTen-like experience (reliable PTT reception after force quit) using only the standard PushToTalk framework? If so, could you share key implementation insights or areas to focus on? (e.g., Is it related to specific usage patterns of the restorationDelegate?)
How do you view this potential discrepancy between standard framework capabilities and the behavior exhibited by some apps? What considerations does this bring to development planning and user experience design (especially when users might have expectations set by the "always-on" behavior of other apps)?
Are there any best practices or specific techniques when using PTChannelManager session management and restoration that maximize PTT message reliability (especially after the app is terminated by the system in the background), while still adhering to the framework's design principles (like user awareness of the session via UI)? [For instance, another developer raised challenges related to PTT framework restrictions here: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/773981]
We hope this discussion can help clarify our understanding of the framework and gather community best practices for building reliable PTT functionality while adhering to Apple's guidelines.
Thanks for any insights or shared experiences!
In didFinishLaunchingWithOptions I have this setup for getting the token to send to my server for notifications. The issue is that the delegate callback didRegisterForRemoteNotificationsWithDeviceToken gets called twice when also initializing a CKSyncEngine object.
This confuses me. Is this expected behavior? Why is the delegate callback only called twice when both are called, but not at all when only using CKSyncEngine.
See code and comments below.
/// Calling just this triggers `didRegisterForRemoteNotificationsWithDeviceToken` once.
UIApplication.shared.registerForRemoteNotifications()
/// When triggering the above function plus initializing a CKSyncEngine, `didRegisterForRemoteNotificationsWithDeviceToken` gets called twice.
/// This somewhat make sense, because CloudKit likely also registers for remote notifications itself, but why is the delegate not triggered when *only* initializing CKSyncEngine and removing the `registerForRemoteNotifications` call above?
let syncManager = SyncManager()
/// Further more, if calling `registerForRemoteNotifications` with a delay instead of directly, the delegate is only called once, as expected. For some reason, the delegate is only triggered when two entities call `registerForRemoteNotifications` at the same time?
DispatchQueue.main.asyncAfter(deadline: .now() + 4) {
UIApplication.shared.registerForRemoteNotifications()
}
func application(_ application: UIApplication, didRegisterForRemoteNotificationsWithDeviceToken deviceToken: Data) {
print("didRegisterForRemoteNotificationsWithDeviceToken")
}
I have an app that pairs with a wearable Bluetooth device that collects users' health data. My web backend sends two push notifications every hour to all app users—one at XX:05 and another at XX:15. The first notification instructs the app to download data from the paired wearable device, while the second prompts the app to upload the downloaded data to the backend server's database.
However, I’ve noticed that many push notifications are not processed by iOS apps, especially at night. Based on Apple's documentation, iOS prioritizes push notifications and may ignore lower-priority ones to conserve battery life.
Is there a way to increase the priority to ensure that more (or all) push notifications are processed?
Would integrating the HealthKit framework help? Currently, I use Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) to send push notifications. Additionally, my app falls under the Health & Fitness category. Would changing it to Medical increase priority? P.S. I understand that Apple requires certain certifications for an app to be classified as Medical.
Topic:
App & System Services
SubTopic:
Notifications
I'm working on implementing Apple Wallet passes using background push notifications.
My server successfully sends the push notification using APNs. The response from the server is HTTP/2 200, and the device receives the push — I can confirm this from device logs.
However, the device logs show the following error:
"Failed to parse JSON message payload for topic "
"Unable to deserialize JSON message payload"
My payload is below 2 payload.
//string payload = "{"aps":{"content-available":1}}";
string payload = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(new
{
aps = new Dictionary<string, object>
{
{ "content-available", 1 }
}
});
string curlArgs = $"-s -o nul -w \"%{{http_code}}\" " +
$"--data-binary \"{payload}\" " +
$"-H \"apns-topic: {bundleId}\" " +
$"-H \"apns-push-type: background\" " +
$"-H \"apns-priority: 5\" " +
$"-H \"content-type: application/json\" " +
$"-H \"authorization: bearer {jwt}\" " +
$"--http2 https://api.push.apple.com/3/device/{token}";
I’ve confirmed that:
The device has the Wallet pass installed.
The apns-topic header is set to my passTypeIdentifier.
The apns-push-type is background and apns-priority is 5.
Steps to Reproduce:
Install Wallet pass on iOS device.
Send background push to device using the above payload.
Observe the device logs using Console.app or log stream.
See error: unable to deserialize JSON message payload.
Is there a specific payload format expected for Wallet passes? Or any additional fields required in the push payload to avoid this deserialization error?