Question

Is there a way to simulate push notifications by pushing data to mobile safari? Here are 2 scenarios.

1. I make a web app via phonegap and dont want to use APNS but rather make a web-socket connection and push data to the device myself. On the device end is there a “alert” function I can call to emulate a pop up when a user is not in the application?

2. Lets throw web app out the window. Is there a way I can do this in native mobile safari? Im not talking about a plain old JS alert window that would only come up if the user was in the app, but be able to do so with it backgrounded.

Answer 1

You cannot run background tasks with mobile safari so for #2 you can’t do true push notifications or alerts. However you can send a user an SMS if you have the user’s phone number. This can have a hyperlink to a part of your web site (which can contain some sort of payload). You can use a service such as Twilio to help you send SMS’es. However this costs money. APNS does not.

For scenario #1 I’m assuming you’re talking about a native app using a phonegap solution. In this case when the app is backgrounded you cannot access any UI at all and wake up the app and show a UIAlert. In fact unless an app is registered for location updates or background music, the app is effectively not going to respond after a set period of time (it only can “finish” certain operations it had started before). So the websocket solution will only be effective if the user has the app opened.

You could register a local notification that runs at some predetermined time which will show an alert. But that is not being pushed from the server so its probably not what you want.

APNS is your best solution for scenario #1. Its not that hard to implement and its pretty inexpensive. Check out urban airship if you want to avoid building out your own server-side components for it.