I'm looking into developing a cross-platform mobile app using Intel XDK and Cordova.
The scenario is like this:
- Every n minutes (e.g. n=5) check a specific URL for updates.
- If there are any updates, show or increment the badge on the app icon.
Before you say "use push notifications!" let me explain a bit more. The app I'm building will use a third-party API. Every user should keep a state of what's been seen / not seen. If I were to use push notifications I'd have to build my own backend and API that consumes the third-party API, store the state for every user and send push notifications on every update. That does seem like a major overhead.
For such a scenario iOS has 'background app refresh' since version 7. I would like to use this, but not sure how to.
So, what I would like to know is:
- Can I use the background app refresh functionality through Intel XDK / Cordova and how?
- How would this work for Android devices?