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Did you know you can put a whole game inside of a push notification

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Re: Did you know you can put a whole game inside of a push notification

#81

Post by girvo »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #80
girvo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, all developers have never been equal. At least not over the last 20 years that I’ve been paying attention.

On deaktops, neither windows nor dlinux do not behave differently depending on developer's name. I see no reason why mobile devices should be any different. I wonder if there are grounds for anti-monopoly lawsuits.

Windows absolutely does: it has a large collection of various hacks in place to detect specific applications to keep the running across newer versions of Windows. This is neat in a technical sense, but you’ve gotta be on Microsoft’s radar and worth it for them to put that sort of effort in for you.

On top of that, the partner support you used to get from Microsoft if you were a developer they cared about was orders of magnitude more helpful and useful than what you’d get if you weren’t a preferred partner.

Linux, you’re more correct I’d think.

Re: Did you know you can put a whole game inside of a push notification

#82

Post by gdeglin »

tdrp wrote: post #74
gdeglin wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some well-intended reasons for this, but unfortunately, they've resulted in many problems that don't have simple solutions. To help increase battery life, both Apple and Google provide a standard notification backend that keeps a single background connection open for every device and routes notifications to the device. Google and Apple require the use of their systems for push notifications (APNS and FCM).…

Thank you for this! It seems like many apps on the growth path go through this same investigation, since we arrived at many of the same conclusions you did (down to calling our own webhooks from within onMessageReceived to retry, or figure out which kinds of devices had the most problems). We spent over a year on this before we hit what I think is our maximum achievable delivery rate of around 85% (short of repeatedl…

We've tried contacting OEMs about some of the more buggy behaviors we've seen related to their power optimization features. Unsurprisingly, even when we did get ahold of someone in the US who was senior enough to understand the problem, they had limited ability to influence the China-based operations of the company. Getting whitelisted seems nearly impossible unless you are a large company with a major presence in China and connections to the OEMs.

Google has hinted that they are working on something to improve the situation, but it's been years without resolution and the problem appears to have become worse instead of better.

There's a lengthy thread in this old Android bug report about the issue https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/122098785

Re: Did you know you can put a whole game inside of a push notification

#83

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

girvo wrote: post #81
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On deaktops, neither windows nor dlinux do not behave differently depending on developer's name. I see no reason why mobile devices should be any different. I wonder if there are grounds for anti-monopoly lawsuits.

Windows absolutely does: it has a large collection of various hacks in place to detect specific applications to keep the running across newer versions of Windows. This is neat in a technical sense, but you’ve gotta be on Microsoft’s radar and worth it for them to put that sort of effort in for you. On top of that, the partner support you used to get from Microsoft if you were a developer they cared about was orders o…

I mean, if the apps is built for current windows, it runs and has all access to all APIs the system has for apps. So apps like Transmission will load after startup and will be seeding torrents in the background, you don't have to be on some special list to do that.

Re: Did you know you can put a whole game inside of a push notification

#84

Post by tdrp »

gdeglin wrote: post #82
tdrp wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for this! It seems like many apps on the growth path go through this same investigation, since we arrived at many of the same conclusions you did (down to calling our own webhooks from within onMessageReceived to retry, or figure out which kinds of devices had the most problems). We spent over a year on this before we hit what I think is our maximum achievable delivery rate of around 85% (short of repeatedl…

We've tried contacting OEMs about some of the more buggy behaviors we've seen related to their power optimization features. Unsurprisingly, even when we did get ahold of someone in the US who was senior enough to understand the problem, they had limited ability to influence the China-based operations of the company. Getting whitelisted seems nearly impossible unless you are a large company with a major presence in Ch…

Thanks for the link. I noticed some of these OEMs had started implementing their own "more reliable" PushKits, but I am guessing that the privacy implications are quite bad so it's basically a non-starter.

Re: Did you know you can put a whole game inside of a push notification

#85

Post by gdeglin »

tdrp wrote: post #84
gdeglin wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've tried contacting OEMs about some of the more buggy behaviors we've seen related to their power optimization features. Unsurprisingly, even when we did get ahold of someone in the US who was senior enough to understand the problem, they had limited ability to influence the China-based operations of the company. Getting whitelisted seems nearly impossible unless you are a large company with a major presence in Ch…

Thanks for the link. I noticed some of these OEMs had started implementing their own "more reliable" PushKits, but I am guessing that the privacy implications are quite bad so it's basically a non-starter.

Yes. Also, for example, Huawei is not permitted to use Google Services on their new devices. As a result, they leverage a replacement called HMS and they replaced FCM with the HMS "Push Kit".

Privacy or not, it's the only way to send notifications to new Huawei devices that don't have FCM like the Huawei P40 that are sold worldwide. This isn't a niche issue -- Huawei was recently the #1 manufacturer of smartphones outside of China, surpassing both Apple and Samsung. Although this ranking has fallen as consumers have become aware of the lack of Google Services on these devices.

Re: Did you know you can put a whole game inside of a push notification

#86

Post by gdeglin »

Too wrote: post #79
gdeglin wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some well-intended reasons for this, but unfortunately, they've resulted in many problems that don't have simple solutions. To help increase battery life, both Apple and Google provide a standard notification backend that keeps a single background connection open for every device and routes notifications to the device. Google and Apple require the use of their systems for push notifications (APNS and FCM).…

#3 shouldn't break normal apps (excluding these chinese notification solutions), it's clearly documented restrictions apps should adhere to on https://developer.android.com/guide/components/services , and https://developer.android.com/about/versions/oreo/background , with WorkManager and JobScheduler examples one should use instead. Are you saying OEMs go even deeper and interfere with these APIs rather than just sto…

My understanding is that this Samsung device feature operates outside of Android's normal background execution limits.

Samsung's documentation on the feature is here: https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00088422/. Notably, the documentation fails to mention that this breaks notifications and timers (like Alarm Clock apps).

This is compounded with bugs on Samsung devices that prevent reliably notification delivery. Here's a thread on the Samsung forum about one of these bugs with 346 (!!) replies: https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/galaxy-s9-series/delayed...

It seems hard to believe that Google and Samsung would allow such popular devices with these behaviors to be sold, but here we are.

Re: Did you know you can put a whole game inside of a push notification

#88

Post by jtbayly »

karmelapple wrote: post #65
jtbayly wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My M1 MacBook Air unexpectedly gave me a battery low warning today after probably 4 hours of use. I quickly checked Activity Monitor and Dropbox was not responding and using huge amounts of CPU. Yeah. This is a problem.

Did you happen to not have an internet connection at the time? I noticed years ago Dropbox would spike CPU usage on my Mac when WiFi was off or couldn’t reach the outside world, like when on airplane WiFi but without paying for internet access. I had hoped they fixed that...

wifi was on and working

Re: Did you know you can put a whole game inside of a push notification

#90

Post by mleonhard »

tdrp wrote: post #59
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #31

I'd prefer Apple to fix horrible notifications on iOS. Since they broke VoIP background notifications, developers have no way to reliably perform silent delivery of information to device. For example in a chat app that syncs with desktop you can deliver incoming messages, showing them as alerts, but you can't deliver your own, because you MUST show alert on every push notification. Another use case is removing notifi…

We've also run an app with 1 million+ users for a few years, and I can confirm that notifications are a wreck on both platforms, but IMO even more so on Android/FCM. In fact most of our calculations show that we have never gone past 85% delivery of high-pri Android notifications to valid FCM tokens. By high-pri here we mean direct chat messages in an active 1-on-1 chat conversation. This has caused many users to aban…

I'm developing an app with critical realtime notifications. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?

1. Does your 85% delivery rate apply to FCM "notification messages" (displayed to user) or only to "data messages" (processed by app)?

2. Do some devices fail to deliver messages when your app is in the foreground? And does it happen often with US-based devices?

3. When the app is in the background, how long does it take for it to stop receiving notifications? I know the answer must vary by device.

4. How do you determine delivery rate of notification messages? I believe those are handled entirely by Android OS and app code runs only when they are tapped. I'm using Flutter and have not yet dug into the details of how Android processes and displays notifications.

5. Do you use FCM to deliver APNS messages?

6. How reliable are APNS messages to a foreground app for US users I'm considering launching iPhone-only.

My app helps people make appointments (dates). It uses notifications to remind users of their upcoming and imminent appointments. The backend detects when a user has not tapped a critical notification and sends them an SMS. This should reach the user even if they didn't see the notifications or they uninstalled the app without cancelling their appointments.

I also implemented real-time chat using FCM data messages with a slow poll fallback. If data messages are not reliable, then I will need to replace the slow poll with a realtime push service. That will be a significant cost in added complexity. I would like to put off that work.

I'm a solo bootstrapper. Working with Android and FCM has been daunting. Would you be interested in mentoring me a few hours a month? I can pay you. My email is in my profile.

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