iOS 10 Notification Hidden Features That You Need to Know
With the release of iOS 10, app developers can leverage the power of a rich set of capabilities added to notifications.
There are so many new possibilities to be explored in this area. So summarizing these in an article seems apt.
Initially, push notifications, as the name suggests, were just tools to inform the user of some new content that is available or some action they would have to take once they are navigated into the app. Now you can add beautiful pictures, videos and even customize the user interface of these notifications.
Capabilities in New Notifications
As you are aware, iOS had introduced the capability to add action buttons to notifications and a provision to input some text. So if you received a text message you could reply from the notification. That was a revolutionary change in iOS notifications. iOS 10 brings much more to your notifications.
New Look and Feel
You notifications can have a title and subtitle in addition to the notification content starting iOS 10.
Media Attachments!!!
Notifications can have media attachments starting iOS 10. With media attachments, your notifications would look like these.
Media attachments can be images or videos.
When you expand notifications with media attachments, the media will be presented in a default UI.
For a video attachment, it would look like the one shown below.
One thing you need to be specifically conscious about is the size of your media attachment. Make sure that you are sending a short version of your video clip or a downscaled image. When you look at it from the development perspective, iOS has placed some restrictions on the time your notification can utilize to download the attachments.
Custom UI
iOS gives app developers the capability to customize the expanded view of notifications. You can insert any views inside the expanded view. A sample that I created for illustrations purposes is shown below.
But on the downside, no user interaction is possible on this view. And at the moment it looks like animations wouldn’t work on them too.
But yes iOS supports gifs as media attachments. That probably gives space for some animated and interesting content.
Updating and Removing Delivered Notifications
Now you can update already delivered notifications. Well, you might be wondering how that can be convenient. You wouldn’t risk cluttering the notification center. Users wouldn’t get confused. For eg., if you are updating the status of a food delivery order, it would make sense updating the status of the order in a single notification rather than presenting the user with a series of notifications.
You can even remove a notification sent to the user!!!!!
This is possible in both remote and local notifications.
Changes From the Development Perspective
All your notification related handling has been moved to a new framework called UserNotifications.
Media attachments have to be made to the notifications, once they are delivered to the device. This is performed using a brand new Notification Service Extension.
Likewise customizing the UI of notifications can also be achieved using an extension called Notification Content.
More on the development related trivia in the next article.
References
Developed at Innovation Labs @ Y Media
