Push Notifications on Apple Sandbox APN Server performing poorly

Question

Push notifications are working well and incredibly fast (< 1 second) for our app on production, but when testing staging builds that point to the sandbox APN server, the notifications BARELY work (some do come in, but can take several minutes).

Is this a known issue of the sandbox APN server? If we were doing something wrong, it seems that it just wouldn't work at all - but some do come in, which is puzzling. We don't want to push the build to production without being able to thoroughly test notifications and ensure it's working well.

Does anybody anything about this issue?

Answer 1

You can and should test your app with an ad hoc build, that works with the production APN server. That's the best way to test that the app (and push notifications in particular) is production ready.

As for the sandbox env, perhaps the db used for the sandbox test contains some production device tokens, which cause the failures.