Overview
Using Chat SDK for iOS, you can send notification messages to your user's device when the device is either idle or running the client app in the background. For group channels, notifications can be configured to display an alert, play a sound, or place a badge on the client app's icon.
Push notifications for iOS client apps are sent using Apple Push Notification service (APNs), which contains custom data that your app needs in order to respond to the notifications. When a message is sent to the Sendbird server through our Chat SDK for iOS, the server communicates with APNs, and then APNs delivers a push notification to an iOS device where the client app is installed.
Note: By default, when a user receives messages while disconnected from the Sendbird server, the server sends notification requests to APNs for the messages. When a user's client app goes into the background from the foreground, the Chat SDK for iOS automatically detects the change and updates the user's connection status to disconnected. Therefore, the
disconnect(completionHandler:)method doesn't need to be explicitly called.
Push notification support for multi-device users
Push notifications support both single and multi-device users and they are delivered only when a user is fully offline from all devices. In other words, if a user is online on one or more devices, notifications aren't delivered and thus not displayed on any devices.
Additional multi-device support for push notifications is also provided. If selected from your dashboard, notifications are delivered to all online and offline devices for multi-device users. However, notifications are displayed only on offline devices through iOS.
Note: Depending on how you implement your client app, notifications can be displayed even when the app is in the foreground, given that additional multi-device support for push notifications is selected on your dashboard. Refer to Apple Developer Documentation to learn how.
Functionalities by topic
Users can set their preferences in receiving notifications in their devices. The following is a list of features that our Chat SDK provides.
Configuring preferences
| Functionality | Description | Open channel | Group channel |
|---|---|---|---|
Register APNs notification credentials to send notifications. | |||
Turns push notifications on or off in a user's app by using registration token. | |||
Displays customized push notification messages on a user's device using templates. | |||
Receives notification messages translated into a user's preferred languages. | |||
Receives notification messages translated into a user's preferred languages. |