I am testing Delta.Chat on iOS (iPhone 6s) and I came across the following issue:
If I have a mail address in my contacts and I send from this address a mail to my Delta.Chat account I do not get any notifications or any message. I do not get even a contact request. The mail is deliverd successfully when I check it in my mail programm. If I start the conversation from Delta.Chat and click on “response” the message is sent back successfully and appear also in the Delta.Chat app. However, if I send a new mail from the same address over my mail programm (e.g. gmail) then it does not appear since it is a new mail thread.
With android devices it works fine, however.
Does anybody know if it is a bug, not implemented yet or when it will be probably be implemented?
to the notifications: they should appear if the app is in background. however, this may take some minutes as, if an app is not using the centralized apple-push-notifications (apn), apple just allows the app “from time to time” to check for new messages. the timing cannot be controlled by the app.
we have some ideas to improve this in the future, and, of course, there may still be bugs - the current testflight release uses the core-rust that in a very early version.
so, all in all, i am pretty sure this will getting better and reliable
the refreshing time is not too bad I think. The bigger issue is that for example a person A has downloaded the app and a person B has not.
If A has the address of B in her contact list and B sends a mail directly from its email provider to A
then for android users they receive the message, however, iOS users do not.
If A sends a message from Delta.Chat to the address of B and B clicks on
“reply” and response directly to the mail, it appears in the app = same mail thread (android and iOS).
As long it is always “replied directly” to the mail = same mail thread then the notification works fine.
However, if a new thread is started by B by sending a new mail (from scratch) to A then it is not received in the iOS app,
but it works fine on android devices.
Kind regards and thanks a lot for your help.
Philip
Greetings,
Is there any improvement on this issue?
As a matter of fact, I didn’t receive any notification from the delta.chat IOS (v1.2.1) within half an hour after the recption of the “initial call” seen in the mailbox.
in general, lots of bugs wrt message receiving were fixed.
the main remaining issue is that we do not have good control about when apple allows us to check for messages. depending on the battery, the network connectivity, if the device is moved or laying on the table, this may be everything between some minutes and, under bad circumstances, even hours. possibly upcoming changes that streamline the thread handling may improve this slightly, but this is not sure, as the whole things is very opaque. another idea may be to support providers that can use the apple cloud for push notifications then, but there are no concrete steps in this direction, only discussions.
in practice, however, at least on my devices, i have no delays longer than 30 minutes usually, most times, only some minutes.
once the app is opened, however, messages are read immediately.
as said, there are ongoing discussions wrt apn and gcm - probably since the first day of Delta Chat
however, apn is tricky for a real decentralized service. in theory, the sending device could also initiate the call to apn and wake up the receiving device, however, apple does not allow this usecase, so you need a more or less central server - in addition to the central apn sever itself.
