iOS Mobile App Notifications

support
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Actually - don’t worry. I found it “Fig for Discourse”

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Hi all, sorry to bother. Just wanted to check the status of iOS push-notifications issue for self-hosted forums. Been a while since the last post here. Anything new or is it still not possible?
Thanks!

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There have not been any changes recently to add more support for self-hosted push notifications to our iOS app. However, the app does have a background job that is supposed to run every half hour or so and it is supposed to pull in push notifications. This uses a background fetch service from the OS which is notoriously unreliable, so it’s possible that it doesn’t work all that well.

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@pmusaraj Thanks a lot for the update!

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@pmusaraj nothing new on this front?

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Sorry but self-hosted push notifications would mean you have to register an account with Apple. Discourse can not handle data of forums we do not host.

No news here.

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Thanks Sam. When you say register an act with apple, how would I do that as it’s not a dev act for an app but specifically a website using the discourse app. Is that possible??

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You would have to

  1. Fork Discourse Hub
  2. Register a dev account with apple
  3. Repackage as a standalone app for your site
  4. Publish to the app store
  5. Build infra to handle the push notifications

I am afraid there is no easy solution here, on Android - Google provide a public proxy. Apple do not do that.

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What infra has to be built? I thought they were either handled by the discourse server itself or OneSignal (I can’t remember which).

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We handle notifications for our customer on dedicated infrastructure we host.

The notifications contain data we are allowed to handle, since we host the customers.

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Sorry. Was thinking this was a different thread (this one: Whitelisted Discourse app with Push Notifications via OneSignal)

Edit: it’s probably worth noting that the thread I linked has ostensibly solved all of those problems. However, I’ve never done it myself.

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Please consider offering it as a paid service.
There are use cases where notifications are desired, while most of the discussion content (except for the data in the notification) should still remain on private servers.

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We do offer it as a paid service, sign up for our hosting at https://discourse.org/buy

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+1: using your hosting is not an option, our Discourse-based intranet has to be on premise on our servers. But we would like to “outsource” the notifications.

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I wonder what your data protection officers / legal people think of that. Either they want to keep everything in house, or it does not matter. But we hardly see both at the same time.

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51

Good news for notifications on self-hosted :grinning:

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Very good news indeed! Thank you for sharing that with us here :bowing_man: cc @pmusaraj @Falco

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From what I understand, it won’t work with Discourse. Have I gotten my hopes up over nothing? :cry:

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It’s too soon to say. Anything might or might not be allowed by the time 2023 rolls around.

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