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Push notification networks

Consider whether your solution will interact with push notification networks.

Push notification networks can relay data to a client, even when that client is not running.

Diffusion™ Push Notification Bridge

The Push Notification Bridge is a Diffusion client that subscribes to topics on behalf of other Diffusion clients and uses a push notification network to relay topic updates to the device where the client application is located.

The Push Notification Bridge supports the following push notification networks:
  • Apple Push Notification Service (APNS)
  • Google Cloud Messaging (GCM)

For more information about how the Push Notification Bridge works, see Push Notification Bridge.

Why use the Push Notification Bridge

Diffusion clients on Android™ or iOS® devices might not be running all the time to conserve battery or to enable other processes to run. However, the user might still want to receive realtime updates while the Diffusion client is not running.

By using push notification networks, Diffusion can deliver data to destinations on these devices at any time.

Considerations when using the Push Notification Bridge

  • The Push Notification Bridge supports only single value topics.
  • Push notification networks identify an app on a device (a push notification destination), not an individual user or session.
  • If a client requests push notification for a topic and also subscribes to that topic, when the client is connected to Diffusion it receives topic updates once through the Diffusion server and once through the push notification network. The client must handle removing the duplicate messages from the information presented to the user.
  • Push notification networks currently limit the size of notifications to 2 KB or less.
  • By default, the bridge does not persist the notification subscription requests sent by the clients. If the bridge stops and restarts, this information is lost and notifications are no longer sent.

    To ensure that the notification subscriptions are persisted by the bridge, implement a persistence solution. For more information, see Push Notification Bridge persistence plugin.

This page last modified: 2016/10/19