I have spent 6+ hours reading messages from 2018+ in Discourse Meta, talking with the Discourse AI Bot, using multiple models to do deep research, and testing. I’m looking to confirm my understanding. Thank you for your patience, I realize this may get asked a lot.
High level success: I value a great UX, a great UX requires a user to think the least to accomplish what they want to accomplish. I’m expecting WhatsApp-like new message notifications to my iOS device (iPhone 15 Pro, iOS 26.2).
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At the highest level, it seems the “best answer” to this dilemma/iOS limitations is Discourse Hub. It uses polling, so there is a slight delay, but this is the current best/most stable way to get iOS / Android push notifications from a self-hosted Discourse instance (on docker). If yes, does anyone know what kind of delays we’re talking about, minutes or hours? I can’t find specifics on that.
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If #1 is true, it seems the push notifications are limited to chats if I read that correctly?
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I have spent many many hours testing between Mac OS X Safari, Chrome, Safari Incognito, Chrome Incognito, in my test environment amongst multiple users. Paired with about 20+ attempts at setting up and re-installing the PWA. I’ve triple checked notification settings on the PWA. I’ve tested with multiple accounts, in different browsers, all via sending chat messages in discourse. I deliberately logged out of all sessions to ensure an account wasn’t active. Short of the initial “notifications enabled” push message, after 3+ hours of testing and 20+ different re-installs of the PWA amongst multiple accounts, I can’t get a single pushover notification to show or a badge on the PWA. Does this sound like the accurate state of PWA push notifications on iOS in January 2026? I don’t have an Android phone to test with.
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It seems like the primary reason for these inconsistent behaviors with push notifications is due to iOS Safari notification “technical things.” At this moment in time, there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
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There is an option for pushover app, although that requires setting up an account and $5/month. If I’m looking to create a great UX for my users, something like pushover is certainly not an option. I haven’t used ntfy, maybe that’s easier. Even then, probably wouldn’t ask my users to do that. This is a social group of non-technical people.
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I have had push notifications on desktop Safari work. Emails also work ok.
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If people could self-auth to get notifications in a third party app of their choosing, eg. Telegram or WhatsApp, that might have potential, I see https://www.discourse.org/plugins/chat-integration for Telegram. This could be a workaround… although the only app people would likely have in my world is Telegram.
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I’m not opposed to a Twilio integration, even if I was paying for text messages via Twilio. I don’t see an option for this or plugin. This move would be purely out of desperation. And I’d have to charge subscription for 1-3 cents per message or whatever twill charges.
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Going for a “native Discourse iOS app” is likely not feasible and is highly likely to get rejected in the Apple App Store, confirm? I’ve seen many reports of this.
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It’s possible push notifications work better and are consistent/reliable on Android?
Tldr; January 2026, the single best most reliable and consistent way of getting push notifications to iOS/Android like a native app is to use Discourse hub.
PS. I really secretly hope I’m missing something, and my experience is not accurate.