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How reliable are push notifications ?

edited July 2015 in General
I have been trying different options for push notifications, not only with SecuritySpy, but with Indigo as well, and I have found that my push notifications are not very reliable at all.

Often (maybe 30% of the time), notifications arrive with a significant delay... sometimes up to 10 minutes after the fact.
On a few occasions they did not arrive at all.

I have also been testing Pushover, and here I can see the exact time when a notification has been sent to my device, so what I already suspected has now been confirmed.

This has nothing to do with SecuritySpy, since I have the same problem with Indigo and Pushover.

I'm not really sure how the push notification system works, but I suspect all notifications need to be relayed through apple servers ? If that is the case, do all notifications end up in a qeue waiting to be delivered globally ?

What are the experiences here, do you have reliable push notifications ?

Comments

  • Push notifications need to be sent through Apple's servers. Basically SecuritySpy sends the notification - along with the unique ID of the destination device and a certificate for authentication - to Apple's APN server, which then delivers it to the device.

    Regarding reliability, Apple states in their developer documentation that Delivery of notifications is a “best effort”, not guaranteed. It is not intended to deliver data to your app, only to notify the user that there is new data available.

    So delivery is not guaranteed, however the performance you are getting sounds unusually poor. In my experience, push notifications are almost always successfully delivered, and usually within seconds of being sent.

    How reliable is the internet connection to the Mac sending the notifications, and also to the iOS device receiving them? This may be the weak link here.
  • The connection with the Mac is pretty good, I haven't logged any dropouts at all.
    I can also verify at the Pushover website that the sent date and time is equal to the moment when an event occured and when the notification was generated.

    But I think you might be correct that the bottleneck is with my iOS device. I am sometimes under the impression that things go wrong when my phone switches from cell to wifi, but then again, my iPad has only wifi, and when a notification arrives minutes after the fact, it arrives on both my iPad and iPhone at the same moment.

    I know a while ago that I fiddled around with many of the iOS settings to squeeze a little more battery life out of the device... maybe I disabled something crucial. I'll see if I can reset my settings.
  • Hi there,

    I'm interested in setting up push notifications for my security spy setup. I have remote monitoring set up, motion detection and emailing as an action. Could you point me in the right direction or to any documentation on how to get pushover notifications sent to my iOS device? I've already installed the app on my iPhone and can manually receive notifications but I suspect you have written a script of some sort that automates as an action when movement is detected?

    thanks in advanced,
    Wil
  • Hi Wil,

    I am using SecuritySpy in combination with Indigo for all sorts of automation.
    My pushover messages are handled through Indigo.

    However it should be perfectly possible to trigger notifications directly from SecuritySpy with applescript though.

  • BenBen
    edited August 2015
    Thanks for posting your experiences Pete, it's good to know this can be accomplished via Indigo too.

    Wil - the typical way to do it is to use either the Remote Patrol or Spyglass iOS app, then within the app when you click on a particular camera there is a switch there to turn notifications on or off.
  • Hi Ben,

    Yes I've got the spyglass app, I wasn't aware that the notification switch found for each camera did the same thing.

    In either case I have emails being sent to pushover now for any movement detected to my phone.

    thank you again,
    Wil
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