Silent push notifications only delivered if device is charging and/or app is foreground

We have experienced the same behavior and have been trying to understand why iOS decides to deliver some notifications and not others.

What we have worked out so far is:

• Messages will get received more reliably in background when on wifi than on cellular data. In fact, when on a cellular network (3g/4g), if your signal strength isn't strong enough, iOS receives the push message, but will not wake up your app. We posted in the apple forums about it here: https://devforums.apple.com/message/1069814#1069814. We also opened up a support ticket, and the support team told us to lodge it as a bug report, which we did a couple of weeks ago and are still waiting to hear back.

• When you receive a push message, you need to call the fetchCompletionHandler as soon as possible. Technically you have 30 seconds to perform background processing, but iOS has in place a formula whereby the more frequently you send push messages and depending on the amount of time you spend processing those message before returning the app to suspended state, iOS can reduce the amount of times your app gets woken up in the future.

See here from Apple didReceiveRemoteNotification:fetchCompletionHandler: documentation:

As soon as you finish processing the notification, you must call the block in the handler parameter or your app will be terminated. Your app has up to 30 seconds of wall-clock time to process the notification and call the specified completion handler block. In practice, you should call the handler block as soon as you are done processing the notification. The system tracks the elapsed time, power usage, and data costs for your app’s background downloads. Apps that use significant amounts of power when processing push notifications may not always be woken up early to process future notifications.

In our testing, we have been sending frequent silent push notifications to our app (every 10 - 30 seconds). And the app is awake for about 3 seconds before we put it back to sleep. We have definitely noticed over time a degradation in the frequency in which our app gets woken up to the point where iOS will only wake up the app every 15 - 30 minutes. So there seems to be some sort of decay/throttling formula in place, but we cannot find any documentation on how it exactly works. We have requested this formula and the variables from apple as a support request, but they said "The information you are requesting is not publicly available" and again asked us to file a bug report.

So, hopefully this is helpful? We are still trying to learn more ourselves which is why I found this question :)

With iOS8 background push delivery to apps has changed. A background push will now only be delivered to the app under certain circumstances. Apple have not stated explicitly what these circumstances exactly are but from my extensive experimentation it basically comes down to if the phone is being charged or not. There are some other variables at play (such as network type, device type, wifi enabled) but the major major major factor is whether the device is being charged or not when the push arrives.

If the phone is being charged via a direct mains power supply or indirectly by being connected by USB to a computer then the background pushes will get delivered to the app the vast majority of the time. But disconnect the phone from the power supply or USB and the background push will almost never get delivered to the app, even if the phone's batter has a 100% charge.

You can very easily test this for yourself just by sending some pushes while the phone is being charged versus while its not. BUT you must take into account that background pushes with a development build and using the sandbox environment DO NOT behave the same as background pushes with a production build and a production environment, the background pushes are actually more likely to be delivered to the app in development then they are in production so it is vital you test using a production build and Apple's production environment to see the actual results.

Note there are two steps the push delivery, the first is it needs to get delivered to the phone itself, the second is once the phone has it, it then needs to get delivered by the OS to the app. In iOS7 things such as turing on Wifi made the chances of the push getting to the phone increase. With iOS8 however even though the push is successfully being delivered to the phone, the OS is not forwarding it on to a background app if the phone isn't being charged. This means the phone gets the notification and holds on to it, sometimes for several hours, before it might forward it to the app if the phone isn't being charged.

I had experienced the same problem and the reason behind not receiving push notification while the app is not charging is that when the Low Power Mode is enabled from Settings > Battery it disables background-fetch feature for all applications.

Which prevents device from receiving push notification.

This link might be useful. Apple Documentation