Magento iOS Device Notification with Apple Push Notification Service

Requirements

You must be owner or developer of an iOS application in order to use this extension. This extension does not send notifications to iOS devices direclty and requires an iOS app to work with.

Overview

This is the first of it's kind extension that allows for using Apple Push Notification Service with Magento. It allows your iOS application to connect with Magento and register or unregister devices. The extension will send automatic product update notifications through Apple Push Notification Service which can then be sent to any physical device with installed app.

Key features

• Send product update notifications with Apple Push Notification Service
• Ability to register device through SOAP v.2 (WS-I compliant) API
• Ability to unregister device through SOAP v.2 (WS-I compliant) API
• Works silently on the background
• Does not interfere with normal content creation
• Does not overwrite existing files
• Does not override blocks, controllers and other custom code
• No monthly fees

What is Apple Push Notification Service

Apple Push Notification service (APNs for short) is the centerpiece of the push notifications feature. It is a robust and highly efficient service for propagating information to iOS and OS X devices. Each device establishes an accredited and encrypted IP connection with the service and receives notifications over this persistent connection. If a notification for an application arrives when that application is not running, the device alerts the user that the application has data waiting for it.

Software developers (“providers”) originate the notifications in their server software. The provider connects with APNs through a persistent and secure channel while monitoring incoming data intended for their client applications. When new data for an application arrives, the provider prepares and sends a notification through the channel to APNs, which pushes the notification to the target device.

In addition to being a simple but efficient and high-capacity transport service, APNs includes a default quality-of-service component that provides store-and-forward capabilities.

How it works

The remote-notification data flows in one direction. The extension composes a notification package that includes the device token for a client application and the payload. The extensions sends the notification to APNs which in turn pushes the notification to the device. When the extensions authenticates itself to APNs, it sends its topic to the APNs server, which identifies the application for which it’s providing data. The topic is currently the bundle identifier of the target application.

The communication process includes the following steps:

1. 1) Applications must register to receive push notifications; it typically does this right after it is installed on a device. The system receives the registration request from the application, connects with APNs, and forwards the request. APNs generates a device token using information contained in the unique device certificate. The device token contains an identifier of the device. It then encrypts the device token with a token key and returns it to the device.
2. 2) When the device receives it's device token it then sends it to Magento via SAOP where the extension registeres the corresponding device token. The application must deliver the device token to the extension in either binary or hexadecimal format.
3. 3) At product update, the extension collects all registered device tokens and sends a notification to APNs.
4. 4) When a message is received in APNs it then updates all registered devices and delivers the message.
5. 5) In order to validate a message and device, APNs requires also a certifcate to be provided. The extensions enables admin to upload a .PEM file which is used everytime a notification is sent to APNs.