Why push notifications are not delivered if user has disabled background app refresh in IOS?

Question

shortly after this post I managed to convince our team to use push notifications instead of polling! We will use AWS Pinpoint, which uses APNs for IOS. So far everything is amazing, but we are missing a crucial functionality:

We need to make sure that push notification is delivered if the app is in foreground even if user has disabled notification and has disabled background app refresh for our app.

I understand that push notifications would if app is in background and user has disabled background app refresh, but why it affects foreground? Otherwise, polling is still essential, because it does work if user is in foreground...

Perhaps I am mistaken (I hope so), but I have tested various cases and could not solve this particular case.

Answer 1

If the user has disabled notifications, you will not get notifications.

Also, just a caution, push notifications are not a guaranteed quick delivery. If your connections are odd, they can come slowly. Also, if you move from cell to wifi or vice-versa it can make weird things happen with the notifications.

One thing you can try-- don't let your app run if they have disabled notifications. If it is required for your app to function properly, check for enabled notifications in your app delegate at applicationDidBecomeActive