I must admit that push notifications are a pain point at this time.
The built in push notifications work (sort of…) for Android and Desktop users, not for iPhone users.
The issue with push notifications in my opinion is that there are too many obstacles for them to get through to users. You have to enable it on Discourse personal preferences, you have to allow it on the browser, you have to allow it on the android/windows system. If any of the three is blocking notifications, then users don’t get them. Personally, even though I actively want push notifications, I always find that they stop after a random period of time. Maybe because of browser updates? no idea. So even within Android I can’t say that it really works as I would have liked.
Yesterday I tried Pushover notifications that solution functionally works on Android/Apple/Windows, however, it has two major faults (which is why I didn’t end up using it):
- it requires every user to install a third party app on their phone and manually copy their user_id to the Discourse preferences page
- The notification pops up and instead of directly taking you to the Discourse Chat/Topic, it takes you to the Pushover app, from there you can have a second tap to the URL of the Chat/Topic. It might sound a little petty, but as far as direct messaging notifications go, to add a gateway app between your push notification message and the actual place you want to go is debilitating the experience.
Discourse is always improving, with dozens of commits per day so i remain optimistic that the push notifications would improve. My ideal scenario would be an open source native Android/iOS app that can be customized and submitted to Play/App store by the admin. But perhaps working through third party like OneSignal and the likes could be simpler and achieve the same purpose.