Inquiry About Silent Push Notification Behavior and Limits

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AkhilSasi OP

Created 6d

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Dear Apple Support Team,

I hope this message finds you well.

I am reaching out to seek clarification regarding the behavior and limitations of silent push notifications on iOS devices. Specifically, I would like to understand the following:

Frequency: Is there a defined frequency limit for how often silent push notifications can be triggered? If so, what is the recommended or maximum frequency for sending silent push notifications to avoid potential issues?

Notification Limit: Is there a specific limit on the number of silent push notifications that can be sent to a device within a given time frame? If there are any constraints or best practices, could you please provide guidance?

Understanding these details will help ensure optimal implementation and avoid potential disruptions for users.

I appreciate your time and assistance. Looking forward to your response.

Best regards, Akhil

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Answer 1

Engineer OP

Apple

5d

When it comes to silent notifications, nothing is defined, and there are no "limits", as to what you can send. The push notification system, both on the server side and on the device side, will at their discretion pass on the notification to your app, or simply ignore it, perhaps after some unspecified delay.

In general we can say a user of a device can expect 1-2 silent notifications to reach the apps (that is, all apps in total that might be using silent notifications) per hour, if and only if the conditions on the device permit it.

The important point is that apps should never be designed expecting that every push notification will be received. This is not how APNs is intended to work; it is intended to inform the user or app that some event of interest has occurred. Apps are expected to work properly, albeit perhaps with degraded functionality, if push notifications are not received. The user can turn off push notifications or background app updates at any time, and of course push notifications will not be received if the device doesn’t have network connectivity. Also, an app will not be woken in the background by a push notification if the app had previously been force-quit. Force quit is considered a drastic choice by the user to say that they do not want the app to run, often because it misbehaved in some unrecoverable manner. Additionally, these notifications will not be delivered to the app at all if the user has not launched the app for a while.

I don't know what your use case here is, but silent push notifications is not a good way to implement some functionality that demands strict timing and certain execution.

Argun Tekant /  DTS Engineer / Core Technologies

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