How to badge the app via push notification?

[linhewinner]

I am on StreamChatSwift 4.10.0
Recently upgraded to Push 2.0

After the upgrade to Push 2.0, payload.badge is nil ... the app no longer has a badge number.

I implemented a NSE (Notification Service Extension) as instructed by the documentation; but there isn't an obvious way to get an unread count.

I tried a few things:

• call client.connectUser => but it complains that the chatClient isn't in active mode (which is the case for an NSE by default)
• use client.currentUserController().unreadCount => always returns 0. it looks like this doesn't work without .connectUser
• use client.currentUserController().synchronize => returns an error that there is no connection
• use client.channelListController() and its .synchronize => I manually sum up the unreadCount but ... the values are way off for some reason. It also depends on ChatRemoteNotificationHandler to call the /sync API, which is throttled at 6 seconds. So depending on how fast push notif comes in, the values can be expected to be wrong.
• use client.apiClient directly to query Stream's backend via REST API ... but apiClient is a private property I can't access

Out of desperation, I think I am just going to make a REST API call to my own backend, where I will query stream's backend for the unread count. That would be a very sad latency ...

Do you guys have any recommended way of updating an app's badge when a push notification arrives?

cc @tbarbugli and @b-onc from this PR: #1412

[nuno-vieira]

Hi @linhewinner!

Yes, the badge is not part of the Push v2 anymore. It was deprecated because the value was limited to 100 and it wasn't calculated accurately. We are working at the moment on writing docs for how to use the Push v2 with the iOS SDK and it will soon be available. But the solution right now is to calculate the badge locally and save it in UserDefaults for example. Whenever you receive a notification you increment the badge count, and when the user opens the app the badge count is cleared. Or you can make the logic more complex, store an array of message IDs, and clear those IDs only when the user reads them.

Let us know if you have any more questions in the meantime.

Best,
Nuno

[nuno-vieira]

The first use case I described is what for example WhatsApp does. The badge keeps increasing for every new notification, but once you open the app, it clears the badge count, even if you didn't open any channel. Ofc you can increase the complexity if you want to make it sync with the unread count.