Apple Push Notifications - Resend on Failure?

Question

I think I had once seen a way to tell the Apple Push Notification Service to re-send notifications that were unsuccessfully delivered on their first attempt. Is there a way to do this and can you point me to some information regarding this?

My goal is to send a notification to 100 people and if 10 of them fail to be delivered, have those 10 failures retry.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, as far as I know, no such functionality exists directly. You can check that the notification time to live is long enough, go with a persistent notification solution (Urban Airship), or do your own delivery verification and redelivery through some back end service of your own which would work with Apple's feedback service.

If a delivery failed (APNS connection is lost), APNS would attempt to deliver only the latest notification when the connection to APNS is re-established. Your other notifications would not be delivered if this is the case. If you are looking for something persistent, look at Urban Airship and similar services (Pusher may be another, though I have not used it) that offer functionality similar to an e-mail inbox for various mobile platforms including iOS.

If you're seeing issues with the latest notification not making it through, you might want to check that the TTL is not too short on that notification. That's all that comes to mind.