Get Started with Push Notifications on iOS!
Push notifications may seem simple and straightforward at first since almost everyone is familiar with them; however, knowing how and when to use them in practice can prove challenging.
With advancements in the latest iOS releases bringing advanced features, such as rich media notifications, notification actions, grouped notifications and more, you will quickly realize that you need a book to help you out. Well, here’s that book!
You’ll learn everything you need in order to create, send and receive push notifications, meaning notifications that come from an external service, as opposed to locally from the device. You’ll also cover how to handle local notifications because, sometimes you don’t need all the overhead of a remote notification; rather, it’s enough to simply schedule a notification to appear at a specific point in the future or when you enter a specific location.
Since push notifications is such a focused subject, this book is direct and to-the point; instead of wading through 300 pages of theory before getting down to business, the book gets the job done in just over 150 pages. It’s just the information you need, just when you need it.
By the end of this book, you’ll be a master of push notifications and well on your way to implementing them inside your own apps!
Before You Begin
This section tells you a few things you need to know before you get started, such as what you’ll need for hardware and software, where to find the project files for this book, and more.
What You Need
FreeAbout the Cover
FreeIntroduction
FreeSection I: Push Notifications by Tutorials
Begin your journey into rich media notifications, notification actions, grouped notifications and more!
Introduction
FreeA quick introduction over what you'll be learning this book, and what you'll need to get started.
1Just before diving in, learn the basics of what is a push notification, what's the flow for delivering them, and what are they useful for.
2A push notification is constructed and delivered based on a payload structure. In this chapter you'll dive deep into all of the possibly customizations and options to this payload structure.
3Learn how to prepare your Xcode Project so user app is capable of receiving push notifications, and registering users of your app for receiving notifications.
4Learn about Apple Push Notification Servers (APNs) - Apple's service for delivering push notifications. What is a device token, and how do you test sending notifications from your own Mac?
5Delivery of remote push notifications is usually done by a remote server. Learn how to create your very own Vapor-based server to register device tokens and deliver notifications from your own server, as well as some of the optional third-party providers you could use.
6Now that you have a server responsible for delivering your notifications, you'll learn how to expand your app to communicate with that server.
7Learn how to handle common scenarios relating to push notification such as delivering notification in the foreground, handling user interactions, silent notification, and pre-fetching content in the background when your notification is delivered to the user.
8Add Custom Actions to your notification, and learn how you can leverage these to take your notification interaction to the next level.
9Learn how to modify the push notification payload after it actually arrived at the user's device, letting you manipulate your notifications on-device. Also learn how to share data between your app and your extensions, giving you a way to increment the notification badge from the device.
10Step up your notification game! Build your very own custom UI to present to your users whenever they interact with your notifications.
11Combine all of the vast knowledge accumulated in the previous chapters into building your final app - CoolCalendar.
12Sometimes scheduling notifications on the device itself can prove to be the right choice, instead of receiving remote notifications from an external server. Learn how to schedule local notifications on specific times, or on specific locations.
13
Who is this book for
This book is for intermediate iOS developers who already know the basics of iOS, and who wish to know everything there is to know about push notifications. It starts with a basic introduction of how notifications work, with later chapters going much deeper into advanced materials.
Concepts covered in this book
Reviews
Version history
Third Edition · iOS 14, Swift 5.3, Xcode 12
Second Edition · iOS 13, Swift 5.1, Xcode 11
Push Notifications by Tutorials
Take a deep dive into rich media notifications, notification actions, grouped notifications and more.
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