Notifications are the way of an application to communicate with users, especially when it’s not running in the foreground. A notification, as its name implies, is used to *notify* a user either about an event, or just to remind something important. In fact, notifications are extremely useful in reminding applications, but they’re also quite handy in a number of other cases. For example, a notification can be shown when a user enters a predefined region (that’s new in iOS 8), when a download is complete, or when a friend has sent a message to a chat application. No matter what, the purpose of notifications is to pull the users’ attention, so they act on the message they see.
From the programming point of view, notifications consist of a quite standard aspect that can be easily implemented into an application. As there’s no much room for improvisation, developers almost always follow a predefined path to add notification features in their applications. That is to specify the details of the notification that will be delivered by the system, to handle the app launching due to a notification, and finally, starting from iOS 8, to handle any actions that have been set regarding them. The per application logic is the only thing that gets changed.
Up to iOS 8 there were essentially two kinds of notifications:
- Local notifications: These are notifications specified by the developer and are triggered by the app itself. The exact time that they’ll appear is always scheduled.
- Remote notifications: In this case, the notifications can be split in two subcategories: (a) The push notifications, which are initiated into a web server, then go through the Apple Push Notification servers and finally they’re shown to users at the moment they arrive to the device. (b) The silent notifications, which are actually push notifications, but they’re not shown to the user straight away. Instead, they’re handled internally by the application in order to perform a task, and when everything is ready, a local notification is scheduled to inform the user.
