Question

I would like to know if it’s possible to force the “XXXXX would like to send you push notifications” popup from within an app, after an initial decline. The use case is as follows:

• The user installs the app, gets the alert about push notifications,
  and declines because they don’t know/trust the app yet.

• They use the app and proactively request within the app to be alerted
  when something happens (say for example something they want to buy is
  sold out so they want to be alerted when it is back in stock).

• So now the user has asked the app to notify them about something
  specific but has push notifications disabled at the operating system
  level.

• So if the user requests an alert, but I detect that they declined
  alerts on first run, I need to notify them of this and have them turn
  push notifications on for the alert to work.

• Ideally, I would like to force the “XXXX would like to send you push
  notifications alert” at this point (a second time since they
  installed the app).

• I guess plan b would be to show them my own message telling them they
  have to go into their system settings and turn it back on manually in
  order to receive the alert they want. This is far from ideal.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

You can’t make iOS show the alert again. Here’s a better approach:

1. Keep a flag in your NSUserDefaults indicating whether you should register for push notifications at launch. By default the flag is false.
2. When you launch, check the flag. If it’s true, register immediately. Otherwise, don’t register.
3. The first time the user does something that would cause a push notification, register for push notifications and set the flag in NSUserDefaults.

This way, when the user gets the push notifications alert, he has some idea why he’s getting it, and might actually say yes.