Forem Creators and Builders 🌱

Lee
Lee

Posted on

Admin > Apps > Consumer Apps

Hi there!

I spotted this in the admin console the other and just went ahead and set up push notifications to a stand alone app as a bit of a test.

Alt Text

Looks very exciting! Is it supported yet or is it coming soon?

Thanks!

Top comments (3)

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citizen428 profile image
Michael Kohl

The best person to answer this is @fdoxyz_6 but see github.com/forem/forem/pull/13588 for some context.

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lee profile image
Lee

Thanks Michael!

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fdocr profile image
Fernando • Edited

Oh no, a problem of having a few accounts (used for testing at some point) is that I can miss these notifications... Sorry about that @lee ! 😳

The docs on Push Notifications were updated fairly recently and they have a bit of context on this feature and its terminology. This is how the Forem iOS app is able to receive Push Notifications from the Forem instance.

The gist of this process is:

  1. Apps first need to request PN permissions on their own (using Apple APIs)
  2. If the user approves then the app receives the device token and it can now call the ForemWebView helper function:
    • foremWebView.registerDevice(token: token)

Important to keep in mind:

  • The user must be signed in (within the ForemWebView) for this request to work
    • In other words: Only authenticated users can register for PN delivery
  • The Consumer App must be registered in the Forem Admin dashboard
    • Admin > Apps > Consumer Apps
  • Android support hasn't been thoroughly tested. We hope to change this soon now that the iOS app has been released 🙂

Over time this Consumer Apps page will continue to host more and more configurations for... Well, Consumer Apps 😄 The extensibility and configurability of how mobile apps (both official and 3rd party) can interact with any Forem instance are very important to us because of the FOSS nature of Forem.

I'm aware the communication related to this area hasn't been great, so I hope to make up for it by writing a public post or two explaining how all of these moving pieces work together soon now, specially now that the Forem iOS app is out. Thank you for always being curious and on the bleeding edge of things @lee 🙌🏼