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I have a newsstand app that will offer a free subscription that updates daily.

I would like to use push notifications to download the issues in the background.

At first I was considering use UrbanAirship to manage the list of scribers and send out push notifications every day at the same time. Of course this is costly.

Instead would Apple allow me to send local notifications to the app each day at the scheduled time and then the app could go and download the issue in the background, thus avoiding the need for a server to send push notifications or manage a list of scribers or worry about security and certificates etc.

itgiawa
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1 Answers1

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I am not sure about Apple's guideline for this. But I strongly recommend to not try out something like that.

In case your app is not running (not in background) the local notification will not start the download automatically. The Newsstand push notification include the content-available property (with a value of 1) in the JSON payload. Due to this iOS launch your application in background (if not in background) and you can add your content in Newsstand queue for download in background. Once download is complete iOS will close your application. There is no notification alert or any other thing comes which require user to take any action. I think this you cannot achieve through Local Notification.

Other challenges - How do you make sure the new content is always available when local notification is received . - How do you figure out what content to download.

Also check out my answer to this question.

Community
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msk
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