How to Send a Silent Push Notification Payload

How to send a silent Push Notification payload

There are a few options for it! Let's take a small ride to understand all the different payloads and their usage.

---

Simple Payload

Displayed in Notification Center : Yes

Wakes app to perform background task : No

{
    "aps" : {
        "alert" : "You received simple notification!",
        "badge" : 1,
        "sound" : "default"
    }
}

---

Payload With Custom Notification Sound

Displayed in Notification Center : Yes

Wakes app to perform background task : No

Step 1 : Add custom notification sound file (.wav or .aiff extensions only. e.g. notification.wav) in your app bundle.

Step 2 : Configure your payload as shown below to play your custom sound

{
    "aps" : {
        "alert" : "It's a custom notification sound!",
        "badge" : 1,
        "sound" : "notification.wav"
    }
}

---

Notification With Custom Payload

Displayed in Notification Center : Yes

Wakes app to perform background task : No

{
    "aps" : {
        "alert" : "It's a notification with custom payload!",
        "badge" : 1,
        "content-available" : 0         
    },
    "data" :{
        "title" : "Game Request",
        "body" : "Bob wants to play poker",
        "action-loc-key" : "PLAY"
    },

}

Here the data dictionary holds custom information whatever you want. It will also display as normal notification with the alert message "It's a notification with custom payload!".

---

Normal Silent Notification

It will not a show an alert as a notification bar; it will only notify your app that there is some new data available, prompting the app to fetch new content.

Displayed in Notification center : No

Awake app to perform background task : Yes

{
    "content-available" : 1
}

---

Silent Notification With Custom Payload

Here comes the magic to show a notification alert as well awake your app in background for a task! (Note: only if it's running in background and has not been killed explicitly by the user.)
Just add the extra parameter "content-available" : 1 in your payload.

Displayed in Notification Center : Yes

Wakes app to perform background task : Yes

{
    "aps" : {
        "alert" : "Notification with custom payload!",
        "badge" : 1,
        "content-available" : 1
    },
     "data" :{
        "title" : "Game Request",
        "body" : "Bob wants to play poker",
        "action-loc-key" : "PLAY"
     }
}

---

Use any of these payloads according to your app requirements. For background app refresh refer to Apple's documentation. I hope this gives you all the necessary information. Happy coding :)

How to send ios silent push notification to Notification Hub with SendNotificationAsync method

It turned out that I have an issue in registering user to NotificationHub. The "content-available":1 part should be defined like in the code bellow:

string jsonBodyTemplate = "{\"aps\":{\"content-available":1, \"notificationtype\":\"$(notificationtype)\", \"extra\":\"$(extra)\"}}";

push silent notification through GCM to Android/IOS

Android:

UPDATE:
New Documentation for FCM: https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud-messaging/concept-options#notifications_and_data_messages

As long as you do not include a notification tag in your payload and put a data tag in it you get a silent notification

this example would show a notification

{ "notification": {
    "title": "Portugal vs. Denmark",
    "text": "5 to 1"
  },
  "to" : "bk3RNwTe3H0:CI2k_HHwgIpoDKCIZvvDMExUdFQ3P1..."
}

this would not show a notification

{
   "to" : "bk3RNwTe3H0:CI2k_HHwgIpoDKCIZvvDMExUdFQ3P1...",
   "data" : {
     "Nick" : "Mario",
     "body" : "great match!",
     "Room" : "PortugalVSDenmark"
   },
 }

go here to read more https://developers.google.com/cloud-messaging/concept-options#notifications_and_data_messages

iOS

add the tag contentAvailable: 1 to your json payload and you get a silent notification

its that simple

how to send silent notification / background notification using Firebase Cloud Messaging?

Based on the error message that you are receiving, you should remove the apps property since data and notification properties are considered to be valid, as per the documentation.

Now, in regards to the the payload that you found elsewhere, this refers to the HTTP syntax used to pass messages from your app server to client apps via Firebase Cloud Messaging using the FCM legacy HTTP API. You can refer to the the documentation to learn more about the new HTTP v1 API.

To answer your question, when you are using a Cloud Function with Node.js runtime to send notifications using the sendToDevice(token, payload, options) method, you will need to pass the contentAvailable in the function's options parameter.

The contentAvailable option does the following: When a notification or message is sent and this is set to true, an inactive client app is awoken, and the message is sent through APNs as a silent notification and not through the FCM connection server.

Therefore, your Cloud Function might look something like this:

const userToken = [YOUR_TOKEN];

const payload = {
  "data": {
    "story_id": "story_12345"
  },
  "notification": {
    "title": "Breaking News" 
  }
}; 

const options = { 
  "contentAvailable": true
};
  

admin.messaging().sendToDevice(userToken, payload, options).then(function(response) { 
console.log('Successfully sent message:', response);
}).catch(function(error) {
console.log('Error sending message:', error);
});

Sending Apple Silent Push Notification using Twilio

Twilio developer evangelist here.

Good news, if you set the aps payload to

{ "aps": "content-available": 1 }

then Twilio Notify will automatically add the apns-push-type: background to the request to Apple.

I don't believe this is documented anywhere, but I am trying to get that updated.

Can I send a silent push notification from a Firebase cloud function?

I figured out how to modify my code to successfully send a silent notification. My problem was that I kept trying to put content_available in the payload, when it really should be in options. This is my new code:

const functions = require('firebase-functions');
const admin = require('firebase-admin');
admin.initializeApp(functions.config().firebase);

exports.sendNotifications = functions.database.ref('/events/{pushId}').onWrite(event => {
  const id = event.params.pushId

  const payload = {
    data: {
      title: 'An event has occurred!',
      body: 'Please respond to this event.',
      event_id: id
    }
  };

  const options = {
    content_available: true
  }

  return admin.messaging().sendToTopic("events", payload, options);
});

I successfully received the silent notification on my iOS device after implementing application:didReceiveRemoteNotification:fetchCompletionHandler and userNotificationCenter:willPresent:withCompletionHandler.

IOS Silent Push Notification to send custom Key/Value

there is no issue with this until and unless you have configured well. For configuration details refer apple documentation. I have created a POC and it is working perfectly fine and I noticed only once issue if we are utilising Artisian SDK(older version) so it will swallow your payload and that is the only Issue what I was facing.

To be precise:
We can invoke app in background without notifying user by using silent notification. And we can send our custom data as shown in below example:

{"Data":"Vinay","aps": {"content-available": 1}}

Send silent push notification from Firebase console

There is no way to send notifications different from the standard kind from the Firebase Console.

A quite convenient way is to use Postman or curl with a set Authorization Header.

curl -H "Content-type: application/json" -H "Authorization:key=<YOUR-API-KEY>"  -X POST -d '{ "data": { "foo": "1","bar": "2"},"to" : "<YOUR-DEVICE-TOKEN>"}' https://fcm.googleapis.com/fcm/send

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