Add support for time sensitive notification IOS

[JakeOrel]

Hi Ya'll we are wanting to add time sensitive notifications to our application through the remote messaging. I have followed all the setup procedures for IOS (adding the entitlement, and capabilities) I can see that in my app settings i am able to enable the time sensitive notifications and on the push we send from the server, under the aps block we include "inturruption-level": "time-sensitive" however when the notification gets to us when viewing the log that key is not included in the aps section. Thank you !

[mikehardy]

🤔 hmm - this should be there already in the JSON? firebase/firebase-ios-sdk#9036

But...perhaps we are not carrying it through somehow? We may need to add this to our messaging code. Can you log this as a real issue with details and ideally some information on exactly what you see on the logs (paste inside triple-backticks blocks for spiffy-looking markdown)

Alternatively - and to be honest since I am traveling at the moment - a faster path might be to examine this and I think you might find the key here during processing and add it in ? https://github.com/invertase/react-native-firebase/blob/main/packages/messaging/ios/RNFBMessaging/RNFBMessagingSerializer.m

Just reaching right in to node_modules and hacking at it might get it done within a couple attempts and make for an easy PR?

[JakeOrel]

After more inspection and testing im starting to think that this isn't a problem in the package but maybe the communication between our server and firebase. it seems the aps block is actually getting overwritten. I've been logging the userInfo[@"aps"] field on receive inside the package and no matter how i change the aps section i send to firebase its coming through the same way. Have you ever experienced this?

[JakeOrel]

just out of curiosity so i know my source is correct does this layout of the JSON look correct to you

{
    "to": "<insert key>",
    "notification": {
        "title": "Direct Send Test",
        "body": "this is a test for my sanity",
        "sound": "default",
        "badge": 1,
        "mutable_content": false
    },
    "apns": {
        "payload": {
            "aps": {
                "alert": "test message",
                "badge": 1,
                "sound": "default",
                "interruption-level": "time-sensitive"
            }
        }
    },
    "data": {
      "command": "test-message",
      "popup": true,
      "sound": true,
      "uid": "ladF5joB"
    }
}

[JakeOrel]

Oh and one more basic question (btw thank you so much for all your time i really appreciate it) when uploading new certificates after adding the capability to IOS do i need the certificate or can i use the APNS key on firebase, or are they one in the same for this purpose?

[mikehardy]

I apologize but I don't really have an authoritative answer on either of those questions, I can say that the firebase SDK folks do hang out on stackoverflow as one of their official support channels so if you post your questions there and tag them up appropriately you are likely to get a truly authoritative answer (or, at least an answer based on direct experience if not from the firebase SDK team) vs me speculating since I'm not directly reproducing + verifying this stuff

[mikehardy]

I see a comment just now on the related issue you logged with same theme - to keep things in one spot I'll answer here as it has most of the discussion

I'm not great at objective-c either but in my experience simply logging all API calls+parameters or results as control flow is about to hand off to another layer (that is, maybe from firebase-ios-sdk to a system API, or when system API calls an AppDelegate method etc) has been sufficient for me to figure out what's going on. It looks like you've already done that up at the react-native-layer - done some API call logging + parameters - and that has worked for me before as a strategy so perhaps it will show the way

[JakeOrel]

alright thank you so much for your time i really appreciate it hopefully i can stop bothering you for a while haha!

[JakeOrel]

Hate to beat a dead horse but by any chance have you looked into this at all, after talking to firebase support they say it seems to be an issue with receiving and im lost

[mikehardy]

No, unfortunately I'm travelling until mid August so have very very limited time, and probably won't be able to contemplate new features until September after the inevitable catch up. My best recomm if this is time sensitive (pun, sorry) is to propose a PR/ personally develop the feature

[jacobbodkin]

I realize this is an old discussion, but thought I'd write up what my team has found for anyone in the future.

It seems that Firebase is stripping out interruption-level from the notification, not this library. The firebase SDK docs for creating a apns payload reference the correct apple docs for generating a remote notification. However in our testing, when the app receives the notification, interruption-level is always stripped out. This is before react-native-firebase even touches it.

[jacobbodkin]

Also I could find nothing in the firebase-ios-sdk that would be removing interruption-level

[zlanich]

I too am still trying to figure this out. I can see the entitlement listed here: https://docs.expo.dev/build-reference/ios-capabilities/, and I see mentions of people complaining that the interruption-level isn't getting carried through, but I'm trying to do it on a local notification. Does anyone have a clue if this is possible yet?

I also posted here, because it seems like this issue never gets fully solved and the issues get automatically closed: #6373

[emillinden]

@zlanich Did you manage to sort this out? I can’t seem to receive the local notifications as time sensitive, nor the option of time sensitive notifications within the app settings after a lot of trial and error. The docs really don’t say much about it.