There is another scenario that most of the replies are not identifying and the docs are not mentioning either. In my case, I had my device configured with a special uncommon/unrelated setting. Go to Settings -> General -> Background App Refresh You are presented with 3 options: Off Wi-Fi Wi-Fi Cellular Data !IMPORTANT! There are a viral videos on social network recommending setting this to "Off" or "Wi-Fi" in order to save battery life / data plan. Thats when I set this to "OFF", and didReceiveRemoteNotification was never being called in the background, but strangely enough it was called once I opened the app. Even if you have it on "Wi-Fi / Cellular Data", if you don't have internet, it wont be called (duhh), but most important, I think the guides should recommend having this small detail covered in case there are users that fall in the "condition" of having this set to "Off" or "Wi-Fi" and being on Cellular network <- this is more common case. The conditional for this can be retrieved at: UIApplication.shared.backgroundRefreshStatus https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplication/1622994-backgroundrefreshstatus And the funny thing is that it will mess up your logic once the device is in low-power mode, because it will automatically change the status to "Off". There is nowhere to find that this impacts notifications arriving when app is in background mode, so thats odd. Anyways, hope this helps -roberto