Re:iOS7 is not about flat
by potatolicious on Wednesday September 04, 2013 @11:36AM
(#6328277)
Sort of. Yes and no. You can bundle whatever data you want on a push notification, but there are some restrictions:
- Size limits. It's a push notification, so the amount of payload you can attach is pretty limited. Not the whole conversation history of a chat, for example.
- Lack of guarantees or SLA means using it this for time-ordered information is a bad idea. For example, assembling a chat history from a series of pushes is generally a recipe for awfulness. Pushes are not guaranteed to arrive at all, nor arrive in a certain order.
- No sensitive information in pushes, since it's (mostly) transmitted in the clear. Apple recommends payloads be IDs and such and the human-readable component be general. "You have a new message!" rather than "You have a new naughty pic from Jane!".
Long story short, when your app wakes due to a push notification it's almost always smarter to fetch the canonical state over the networking than try to piece it together from the push payload. This incurs a pretty hefty user-visible delay and results in a shitty experience.
- Size limits. It's a push notification, so the amount of payload you can attach is pretty limited. Not the whole conversation history of a chat, for example.
- Lack of guarantees or SLA means using it this for time-ordered information is a bad idea. For example, assembling a chat history from a series of pushes is generally a recipe for awfulness. Pushes are not guaranteed to arrive at all, nor arrive in a certain order.
- No sensitive information in pushes, since it's (mostly) transmitted in the clear. Apple recommends payloads be IDs and such and the human-readable component be general. "You have a new message!" rather than "You have a new naughty pic from Jane!".
Long story short, when your app wakes due to a push notification it's almost always smarter to fetch the canonical state over the networking than try to piece it together from the push payload. This incurs a pretty hefty user-visible delay and results in a shitty experience.