iOS Mobile App Notifications

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

Sorry I need a break from this topic.

[Griff_Wigley]

I’m an admin of a new Discourse forum running on Digital Ocean. All’s working well so far as we prep to open our doors in a month or so.

The Discourse IOS app is working but seemingly with some quirks. And we just noticed the phrase in the App store description:

“for officially hosted discourse forums”

What should I tell my users to expect with their use of the Apps, both Android and IOS?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Primarily the native notification issue, other than that it will work as expected.

[theportablegeek]

@codinghorror Is there any way to pay for iOS push notification functionality witha self hosted forum?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

No, this is not possible. You’d need to use a paid Discourse specific hosting plan, either here or elsewhere.

[Cozdabuch (cosmo)]

If it’s a DO discourse droplet?

[jtbayly]

That is “self hosted” in this context.

[featheredtoast (Jeff Wong)]

Hey @jtbayly I recently published a plugin for pushover that allows a user to sign up for push notifications over Pushover. Other push services could probably be added with not too much difficulty. Maybe this can help scratch your itch here.

Pushover notifications

Plugin for integrating Pushover notifications. https://github.com/featheredtoast/discourse-pushover-notifications This allows notifications to be sent over Pushover, which grants push-notification support for iOS, through the 3rd party app. Configuration Once installed, you will need an Application API token. Create a New Application and fill out the form. After you created the application, copy the resulting API token to the Discourse admin plugin pages, and enable the plguin. All users w…

[jtbayly]

Thanks for sharing that here. I had totally missed it.

[lexxi]

have you found a successful path to receiving notifications while self hosting? if so, will you save me the trial and error by sharing your experiential knowledge? p please.

[jtbayly]

Yes, but it was unrelated to this thread. I simply downloaded a free app on my iPhone called Fig. On every other device, push notifications work out of the box. Hope that helps.

[tiab]

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

[yoel.koenka (Joel Koenka)]

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!

[pmusaraj (Penar Musaraj)]

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.

[yoel.koenka (Joel Koenka)]

@pmusaraj Thanks a lot for the update!

[Cozdabuch (cosmo)]

@pmusaraj nothing new on this front?

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

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.

[Cozdabuch (cosmo)]

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??

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

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.