Unexpected behaviour from registerUserNotificationSettings: and registerForRemoteNotifications - cocoa-touch

Question

I am getting what I believe is an expected behaviour with Push Notifications in iOS 8 in terms of what kind of UIUserNotificationType I should received.
The test I have run is the following:
UIUserNotificationType types = UIUserNotificationTypeBadge | UIUserNotificationTypeSound | UIUserNotificationTypeAlert;
UIUserNotificationSettings *mySettings = [UIUserNotificationSettings settingsForTypes:types categories:nil];
UIApplication *sharedApplication = [UIApplication sharedApplication];
[sharedApplication registerUserNotificationSettings:mySettings];
[sharedApplication registerForRemoteNotifications];
I get the expected UIApplicationDelegate calls and when I send a Push Notification, I receive an alert as expected. All fine until here.
Then, I unregister for remote notifications:
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] unregisterForRemoteNotifications];
And I ran the same code as above but in this case, I do not call registerUserNotificationSettings:
UIApplication *sharedApplication = [UIApplication sharedApplication];
[sharedApplication registerForRemoteNotifications];
I again get all the expected UIApplicationDelegate calls but when I send the same Push Notification, I get the alert on my device and I believe that is not correct. I think I should not get any alert, sound or badge as the the documentation says:
If you want your app’s remote notifications to display alerts, play sounds, or perform other user-facing actions, you must call the registerUserNotificationSettings: method to request the types of notifications you want to use. If you do not call that method, the system delivers all remote notifications to your app silently.
To double check that, I have run just the second snippet on a different device:
UIApplication *sharedApplication = [UIApplication sharedApplication];
[sharedApplication registerForRemoteNotifications];
And in that case I did not get any alert as expected.
Is that the normal behaviour? I would expect that after unregistering, the preferences expressed in the next registration (no preferences in this case) would take precedence but it seems that when registerUserNotificationSettings: is not called, the previous settings are cached somewhere and used to decide what kind of notifications are delivered to the app.

Answer 1

In order to achieve the behavior you want, you should call to registerUserNotificationSettings with a setting configured with no type. This way you will override the cached settings. Like this:
UIUserNotificationType types = UIUserNotificationTypeNone;
UIUserNotificationSettings *mySettings = [UIUserNotificationSettings settingsForTypes:types categories:nil];
UIApplication *sharedApplication = [UIApplication sharedApplication];
[sharedApplication registerUserNotificationSettings:mySettings];
[sharedApplication registerForRemoteNotifications];
If you don't reconfigure the user notification settings, the cached value (that, as you have noticed, persists application reinstalls) will be used.