Notifications

[William Spence]

I am about to release my first three apps on the App Store.  I am already thinking about my first program modifications.  I will immediately need to provide a notification system in my app to let people know when new properties hit the market.  I have never looked into notifications on AIR yet.  Do most of you use some sort of service, an ANE, or do you program notifications manually???  I'm looking for the best approach.

Thanks for any insights!

[William Spence]

Has nobody used notifications in an AIR app?? I could really use some thoughts or Advice if anyone has some.

My initial thoughts were to go with something like this ANE from distriqt combined with OneSignal.

air native extensions

But since I have never done this, I wonder if this is the best approach, or if others have had more success with a different approach?  Please, any thoughts are helpful and welcome.

[Colin Holgate]

There are push notifications and local notifications. Push notifications may well cost you money each time you send out a notification. Look at discussions like this:

ios - Is Apple Push notification using APNS free of cost? - Stack Overflow

Some of the services are free, apparently, but also some are closing down.

The other approach is local notifications. Then you just buy the ANE, here's one:

https://www.myflashlabs.com/product/local-notification-ane-adobe-air-native-extension/

With those you can set up an alert to appear while your app is currently closed. It does mean though that the user has opened your app after the point that you know of an update that is going to happen. The rough process would be something like:

1. User opens your app, which checks a text file on your server.

2. The text file has what your app needs to know about an upcoming update. For example, if you have an update planned for release on May 1st 2018, and you already know that for sure on March 27th 2018, you would have already set up the text file to know about that update.

3. As soon as the user has opened the app, between now and May 1st, you set a local notification to happen on May 1st.

4. On May 1st the notification will appear, even if your app is currently closed.

5. iOS opens your app and sends the details of the notification to a function to handle that. Or you can ignore what it tells you, because you know from the text file what the update is all about.

A number will also appear on the icon of the app, so if the user misses the alert dialog, they may notice the number.

I think that a lot of users do check the App Store app when they are being told there are app updates, so it's debatably whether it's worth the effort of doing your own notification too. But it wouldn't do any harm!

[Colin Holgate]

About #5, iOS opens your app if the user touches the alert dialog.

[William Spence]

Thanks for the reply Colin. I have created a unique real estate app and need to notify my customers when a property that meets their search criteria hits the market. i can’t think of a way to do this with local notifications. I believe I am going to need a solution where I process a batch of queries on my server and push notifications to all of my users. I’m willing to pay for this if need be, but it was my understanding that OneSignal was free, and I know that the distriqt ANE works with OneSignal. I wondered if anyone had tried this approach, or if there is a better solution available??? Thanks for your help!

[joeboy_uk]

I've used one signal before. it is free and its pretty simple. You just set the notification up on the onesignal site and press push. Very straightforward