iPhone notifications, web app and more

[Matt]

The longest awaited iPhone feature is almost here, native iOS notifications, and we couldn't wait to ensure it is enabled for your Invision Community.

Invision Community 4.7.9 is iPhone push notification ready for when Apple release their latest iOS update later this month. This means you'll finally get notifications on your phone, even when you do not have your browser open, to alert you of new content on followed items and more. A feature Android owners have enjoyed for a while.

With notifications, you can have an authentic native app experience with built-in Invision Community features such as the manifest editor.

The manifest editor allows you to edit your theme icons, colours and URL for when your members add your community to their phone's homepage. This manifest file helps mobile devices understand how to display your community site when launched from the home screen.

Your members can add your community to their home screen with the share button. Once it has been added, it looks and feels like a native app downloaded from the App Store.

With Apple finally allowing native notifications and Invision Community's mobile-ready UI coupled with the manifest editor, you can have a real app experience without needing a mobile app.

We intend to bring more functionality and ease of use to mobile devices over the coming releases.

We hope you're looking forward to iOS native push notifications as much as we are!

The features discussed in this announcement are available in both Invision Community and Invision Community Classic.

View full blog entry

[Matt]

Huge thanks to @Daniel F for risking his iPhone by installing the latest iOS beta to get this feature working for us!

[Adriano Faria]

Push notifications should be supported in 3rd-party resources to make notifications from these resources to be available, right?

[Matt]

Yes, we just had to tweak some our our JS code to allow iPhone to register as supported to the rest of our normal notification system.

We'll update our docs, but to get iPhone notifications working you must complete the manifest in the ACP and use the 'add to home screen' feature. It won't work just with mobile safari in a tab, for example.

[Daniel F]

1 minute ago, Adriano Faria said:

Push notifications should be supported in 3rd-party resources to make notifications from these resources to be available, right?

It's just a new "way" to deliver the notification.

As long as the Notification extension doesn't explicitly disallow Push via the config (that's the 'disabled' bit in the config array) and their browser supports it, they can use it.

 

 

[Randy Calvert]

oooooOOOOOOooooo!  I'm excited to see this! 

(And is that a feature that I see available to non-cloud users too?!  What will people start thinking??)

Edited March 22, 2023 by Randy Calvert

[Daniel F]

3 minutes ago, Randy Calvert said:

oooooOOOOOOooooo!  I'm excited to see this! 

That's the actual footage of me after the first successful push notification. And Stu was such a party crasher with his "welcome to 2018... I have them already working for years" comment:D 

[Randy Calvert]

Just tell him....

[Brian Garcia]

Beautiful!

I will explain to you why. I have a Facebook group of almost 7k members. They make it very difficult for me / almost impossible for me to mass message all of my members. I make an organic post and still the reach is barely 10%. Facebook a few months ago introduced the @ everyone tag. At first the reach was about 60-80%, but they have throttled it back down again and I am only get about a 30% reach. Tagging everyone just creates a notification in the Facebook app along with 50 other distracting notifications.

A big reason why I am trying to funnel my members into my Invision Community is that I can get a better engagement rate with them. Having native iOS notifications outside of the noise is huge.

Facebook group members need to realize they don't own any of the data in their group, you're just an admin in Facebook's toy box. Invision actually lets you own the data which is important to me.

[Adriano Faria]

56 minutes ago, Daniel F said:

It's just a new "way" to deliver the notification.

As long as the Notification extension doesn't explicitly disallow Push via the config (that's the 'disabled' bit in the config array) and their browser supports it, they can use it.

 

 

I thought there was a specific method in the extension for Push and I didn't want to waste time in the time I updated my resources so I disabled push.

Thanks.

[GazzaGarratt]

I did get an email a few weeks back about Apple now updating their push notifications so was hoping this would be implemented here soon. Many thanks for getting this sorted as it should help most sites here with their engagement 🙂

Hopefully I can ask a relatively quick and simple question whilst we're here - does the notification automatically remove itself from the tray once clicked on, like all other push notifications for other stuff on mobiles? Reason I ask is because I notice the Android ones always stay on devices but not sure if thats down to software here or maybe browser specific e.g. Chrome?

Thanks again.

[Daniel F]

10 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

I thought there was a specific method in the extension for Push and I didn't want to waste time in the time I updated my resources so I disabled push.

Thanks.

Sorry, you're right, this requires the parse_mobile_..... method to work!

I'll see if we can simplify this, I don't think that we really need it for simple PWA notifications.

[Adriano Faria]

Just now, Daniel F said:

Sorry, you're right, this requires the parse_mobile_..... method to work!

Oh ok. I’ll take a look. 👍

[Daniel F]

20 minutes ago, GazzaGarratt said:

does the notification automatically remove itself from the tray once clicked on, like all other push notifications for other stuff on mobiles? Reason I ask is because I notice the Android ones always stay on devices but not sure if thats down to software here or maybe browser specific e.g. Chrome?

Once the user added the community to his home screen and gave permissions for push notifications, it's treated like a real app and notifications are treated like any other IOS notification. They disappear once clicked and you can use all the OS features like Focus to control what appears when, and configure everything under the IOS Settings > Notifications

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201925

 

[FabioPaz]

Since "android owners have enjoyed for a while", is there a tutorial how to send notifications to android users?

If this is enough "topic hijacking", please remove my comment.

[Afrodude]

[Jordan Miller]

Love this!! Super excited. Nicely done! 

[Rikki]

[Day_]

This having to save the website to the homepage as a web app thing, is that what Apple are forcing all websites to do to use safari notifications then?

[Matt]

They are, yes. It’s so the service workers can run. 

[Charles]

I never thought I would see the day that Apple actually did this.

[Matt]

It definitely removes the need for a native mobile app now.

[KT Walrus]

3 hours ago, Matt said:

It definitely removes the need for a native mobile app now.

How long does the PWA keep me signed in?

Also, can you support sign in by Face/Touch Id?

And, will Badge show on the HomeScreen icon to indicate the number of unread notifications or even just unread PMs?

[FabioPaz]

For some reason Im not a candidate for the beta update, since I have an iphone 7.

 

 

 

(Yeah, I was sincerely intrigued before searching and seeing an iphone 14).

[Randy Calvert]

7 minutes ago, FabioPaz said:

For some reason Im not a candidate for the beta update, since I have an iphone 7.

The supported hardware versions are:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213411

That means it supports iPhone 8 and beyond.  Given that the iPhone 8 was released in 2017....  that's 6 years of updates!  (Personally if my phone is older than 2 years old, I feel it's way too old! haha)