Does Firebase cloud messaging detect when a device comes back online? - firebase-cloud-messaging

Does Firebase cloud messaging detect when a device comes back online and sends any pending notifications that could not reach the device while it was offline (without network / turned off?

Going through the FCM documentation, you could see (emphasis mine):
If the device is not connected to FCM, the message is stored until a connection is established (again respecting the collapse key rules). When a connection is established, FCM delivers all pending messages to the device. If the device never gets connected again (for instance, if it was factory reset), the message eventually times out and is discarded from FCM storage. The default timeout is four weeks, unless the time_to_live flag is set.
So in a way, it does detect it.

Related

FCM push notification when subscribers offline

I was running through FCM documentation and
- I would like to understand about what would happen when the subscribers come online after a longer offline period.
- Will FCM store all the push notifications received during the offline period
- Will FCM deliver all the messages once the subscribers have come online
If the device is not connected to FCM, the message is stored until a connection is established (again respecting the collapse key rules). When a connection is established, FCM delivers all pending messages to the device. If the device never gets connected again (for instance, if it was factory reset), the message eventually times out and is discarded from FCM storage. The default timeout is four weeks, unless the time_to_live flag is set.
Lifetime of a message

Connection and notification in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) GATT Profiles

As stated here, a BLE GATT client can "subscribe" to a specific characteristic in a GATT server to be notified each time a change occurs within this characteristic.
Actually I'm wondering, does the notifying characteristic keep alive the connexion between the client and the server during all the time of the "subscription" ? In other words, after having subscribed to the notifying characteristic, will the client and server remain connected until the client forces the deconnexion ?
Subscription of notifications is not related to whether a client or server should keep a connection or disconnect. There is nothing in the specification that says so at least.
However an application can of course create custom rules such as the link should be disconnected if there are no subscriptions for some amount of time. The Windows BLE stack even does this per default.

RabbitMQ and IoT device: keep queue open?

We're using RabbitMQ in a new project. We'll have IoT devices communicating with queues.
For the devices to send info to the cloud we don't see any issues, however sometimes we need to deliver messages from our backend to the IoT devices. For this we let the devices open an exclusive queue. This works perfectly, as long as the devices are online. When they aren't, the queue is closed and no messages can be send to it anymore.
Is there a way to keep the queue open, so messages are kept until the IoT device comes back online?
Vice-versa: Is there some way to have guaranteed delivery starting at the IoT device. For example: energy measurements every 15 minutes. If the connection drops, messages should be stored on disk (to prevent message loss in case of power cut). They are sent later on when the connection comes back online. Does a service or client library exist that implements this or do we need to develop this ourselves?
Is there a way to keep the queue open, so messages are kept until the
IoT device comes back online?
Use a regular queue, and make sure it's durable if you'd like it to survive RabbitMQ restarts.
Is there some way to have guaranteed delivery starting at the IoT
device.
That depends on the library you are using, but you don't tell us what library nor what protocol you're using (AMQP vs MQTT, for instance).
Some libraries offer automatic reconnect and re-creation of topology (queues, exchanges, etc) but I'm not aware of any that offer local storage of messages until the broker is available again. You'll have to code that yourself.
Please carefully read the documentation with regard to publisher confirmations and consumer acknowledgements, as those are both necessary for reliable messaging link.
NOTE: the RabbitMQ team monitors the rabbitmq-users mailing list and only sometimes answers questions on StackOverflow.
Our Cloud has several exchanges and credentials called CredentialsBucket assigned to a set of IoT devices. When an IoT device register, we provide them this credentials that includes a durable queue and exchange. When the IoT device push messages, it goes to Cloud through the exchange where we do additional security check using HMAC.
When Cloud send a message, it send it directly to his queue (no persistent messages in our case) and the IoT device do the same kind of security check.

Live Tiles - staying connected

Live tiles are able to receive push notifications without the associated metro app needing to be running.
However I believe that the app must have run at least once in order for the app to acquire a notification channel and subscribe to a notification server, passing the channel to the server.
My question is -
What happens if the server cuts off the client? If the user turns off their computer I presume the server would start receiving delivery failure errors. The server might then cut off the client.
But what happens when the user turns their computer back on? Is the tile now disconnected until the user starts the app again and it resubscribes with the server for notifications?
Or is there a way for the tile to resubscribe automatically on start up without the app having to run?
The push notifications are not sent directly to the client; they're sent via the Windows Notification service in the cloud. This means your service will be able to just send them. The WNS service will do the right thing with notifications when the machine comes out of sleep / reconnects to the network.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh913756.aspx has a overview of the service side of notifications.
It's important to note that the tile channel expires after 30 days, and will need to be (programmatically) renewed. The guidance is that you should renew when the app runs to make sure it doesn't expire.
The only thing I can't seem to locate in the documentation is how many push notifications are queued on the client - I suspect that for a given tag notification, only one is kept.
Maybe another way to think about this is with the bad notification -- e.g a "new items" count. If you push this number while the device is disconnect from the network (off, driven over etc), then your service will succeed in sending the notification, and when that machine reconnects, it will seamlessly see the badge update.
You should handle that in your code that when your clients from the server went offline then you should remove them and disconnect them, the client side will only receive the cached values in the live tiles.
If they went back on, then you should also handle it in your server side to push the new notification data.
Just a quick tip: If you are using WCF as your service, you might want to check the Announcement Service Class there you can handle your clients online/offline scenarios.

Using APNs in a messaging app

I'm working on a messaging app (something like WhatsApp) and I have a dilemma about implementing it's main functionality - sending message from client1 to client2.
The thing is I'm using a centralized server design, where clients uses NSURLConnection to send messages to the server, the server doesn't keep and manage open sockets and can't send a message for one of the clients, so clients have a timer and query the server every 2 seconds to see if a new message is waiting for them.
The problem with this approach is that querying the server every 2 second seem to kill the battery very fast, so I thought maybe instead of client querying the server, to use APNS so when client1 send a message to the server, the server will send a push notification to client2, then client2 will fetch the data from the server.
Will this approach work with a massive messaging app requiring massive push notification uses?
Yes. I would say this approach is okay and will perform well.
You could also create a socket connection when your application is running in front. But the APNS-way (your preferred way) will also work when the user has quit your app.
APNS can handle huge load. There where only very few delays as far as i noticed.
The PUSH-System on iOS is just a HTTP Connection to apple which keeps the response-channel open for some hours (like loading a webpage for some hours).
It will use around +10% of your battery.
So best would be to not create another keep-alive HTTP/Socket connection and to re-use apples channel (APNS) to save the endusers battery.
In your app you will receive the Push-Notification and you can parse the JSON-Data and then pull/sync with your own server.
You should also take in mind what to do, when your app is not running in foreground (then you might display the received message as APNS messages as WhatsApp does).