Silent push notifications

Push notifications allow you to notify your app when important events occur. You might send a push notification when you have new instant messages to deliver, breaking news alerts to send, or the latest episode of your user’s favorite TV show ready for them to download for offline viewing. Push notifications can also be silent, containing no alert message or sound, being used only to update your app’s interface or trigger background work.

Push notifications are great for sporadic but immediately important content, where the delay between background fetches might not be acceptable. Push notifications can also be much more efficient than background fetch, as your application only launches when necessary.

Push notifications are rate-limited, so don’t be afraid of sending as many as your application needs. iOS and the APNs servers will control how often they are delivered, and you won’t get into trouble for sending too many. If your push notifications are throttled, they might be delayed until the next time the device sends a keep-alive packet or receives another notification.

Sending silent push notifications

To send a silent push notification, set the content-available flag to 1 in a push notification payload. When sending a silent push notification, you might also want to include some data in the notification payload, so your application can reference the event. This could save you a few networking requests and increase the responsiveness of your app.

The content-available flag can be set in the Braze dashboard as well as within our Apple push object in the messaging API.

Use silent push notifications to trigger background work

Silent push notifications can wake your app from a “Suspended” or “Not Running” state to update content or run certain tasks without notifying your users.

To use silent push notifications to trigger background work, set up the content-available flag following the preceding instructions with no message or sound. Set up your app’s background mode to enable remote notifications under the Capabilities tab in your project settings. A remote notification is just a normal push notification with the content-available flag set.

Enabling background mode for remote notifications is required for uninstall tracking.

Even with the remote notifications background mode enabled, the system will not launch your app into the background if the user has force-quit the application. The user must explicitly launch the application or reboot the device before the app can be automatically launched into the background by the system.

For more information, refer to pushing background updates and application:didReceiveRemoteNotification:fetchCompletionHandler:.

iOS silent notifications limitations

The iOS operating system may gate notifications for some features. Note that if you are experiencing difficulties with these features, the iOS’s silent notifications gate might be the cause.

Braze has several features which rely on iOS silent push notifications:

Feature	User Experience
Uninstall Tracking	User receives a silent, nightly uninstall tracking push.
Geofences	Silent syncing of geofences from server to device.

Refer to Apple’s instance method and unreceived notifications documentation for more details.