I tried this: Send message to phone with killed app Disabled network Launched app (not through notification) I don’t know how whatsapp does this but, you could achieve what you are describing by implementing Notification Service Extension (it will be triggered when a notification comes in, regardless of the app state). Then you can acces the notitication content, do network requests to your backend or store stuff locally. You could store data using App Groups so then when launching your main app you could access that information, previously stored from the extension, without network.