push-notifications_skill

Overview

This skill provides expert decision-making and practical patterns for iOS/tvOS push notifications, covering permission timing, silent vs visible trade-offs, rich notifications, token handling, and APNs architecture choices. It focuses on actionable guidance you can apply while implementing notifications, debugging delivery issues, or designing notification UX. The content emphasizes safe defaults and common pitfalls to avoid.

How this skill works

The skill inspects notification intent and delivery constraints to recommend the right approach: when to show a pre-permission flow, whether a payload should be silent (content-available) or visible, and when to use notification service/content extensions. It evaluates token management strategies, background execution limits, and APNs priorities to produce concrete implementation decisions. It also supplies patterns for handling authorization states, expiration in service extensions, and notification action routing.

When to use it

• Implementing push notifications and choosing when to ask for permission
• Designing notification UX that maximizes opt-in and reduces user friction
• Deciding between silent background updates and visible alerts for time-sensitive data
• Building rich notifications that download media or decrypt content via a service extension
• Debugging delivery issues related to APNs priorities, token rotation, or background execution

Best practices

• Request permission after a clear user action or first meaningful moment, not on app launch
• Use pre-permission screens to explain value and increase acceptance rates
• Never rely on silent notifications for time-critical delivery; use visible alerts when immediacy matters
• Always send fresh device tokens to the server and deduplicate tokens server-side
• Implement serviceExtensionTimeWillExpire to deliver the bestattempt content if work times out
• Keep silent notification handlers short (fetch metadata, schedule BGProcessingTask for heavy work)

Example use cases

• Order updates: show a pre-permission prompt during checkout, then visible alerts for shipment times
• Messaging app: combine visible alerts for new messages with a service extension for E2EE decryption
• News app: use silent notifications to prefetch articles, visible alerts for breaking news
• Enterprise app on multiple devices: register and manage multiple device tokens per user, deregister on logout
• Rich marketing: include media_url in payload and attach media via a Notification Service Extension