iOS 16 web push notifications in 2023

[dfabulich (Dan Fabulich)]

Let me begin by saying that from my perspective, the problem is that people are writing in here and on my forum, saying “I think that push notifications don’t work right,” and other users are chiming in, saying, “Yeah! Me, too! Notifications must be broken/unreliable.” Sometimes they blame Apple, sometimes they blame Discourse, but they all agree that Discourse push notifications are unreliable.

I’d love to be able to investigate these cases myself, saying “you didn’t get the 12:31pm notification on your phone, and here’s why…” but I don’t believe that’s currently possible.

@sam

A lot of different things can go wrong…

Yes, a lot of different things can go wrong, including things on the client side, which I can’t investigate in DE.

• Did the Service Worker receive the push event?
• Did the Service Worker call showNotification?
• Was the showNotification permission granted, or did showNotification accomplish nothing?
• Was the device itself set to Do Not Disturb?

@sam

though at any point in time you can probably use DE to validate: look in the push_subscriptions table for up to date web push subs.

I would love to have some documentation for administrators explaining how to use DE to diagnose a push failure, at least in as far as seeing whether the notification went through.

But I think it would also be incredibly helpful to keep a client-side log that users could send to me, allowing me to cross-reference against the DE log.

@sam

But if you just want to debug this why not set SiteSetting.push_notification_time_window_mins to 0?

For one thing, at least half of the people complaining about this aren’t administrators of their forum. That’s why we need Discourse to implement this:

Let users configure their own push notification time window

push_notification_time_window is a site-wide setting; it’s 10 minutes by default. [image] Wait (n) minutes before sending push notification. Helps prevent push notifications from being sent to an active online user. I think this should be a user preference, instead of a site-wide setting. Some users might prefer 0-minute window or 1-minute window (especially when they’re testing push notifications); others might prefer a 10 minute window, or an even longer window.

But, yes, I suspect that setting this to 0 will eliminate 80% of the “it’s not working” complaints.

Overall, user trust in Discourse notifications is quite low. The more researchable this issue is, for administrators (and even for end users), the more trustworthy Discourse notifications will be.