apple push notification not working in production

Question

We are totally stucked, please help.

I and my team made a iPhone application, and this is the first time we try on iOS.

Everything is fine, until we submitted our app and became available on app-store -- the push notification service is not working. I searched around the web and tried double check on our app by people's advices, but I couldn't find what's wrong. so this question is posted here.

These are what we did:

1. We build the application, suppose it's named "AppMaster".

2. We created AppId on iOS Provisioning Portal called: "pushtest". This ID enabled the Push Notification on both development and production.

3. We created a Provisioning for development named "AppMasterPushTest" from the appId above. This provisioning is for inside test, everyone of the team installed it on their mac.

4. Our server is implemented by Java and we used the java-apn package. during the test, We downloaded the certification file for development and write out the .p12 file, and pushed our message to the "sandbox" server by using the package's api -- withSandboxDestination() with that .p12 file. test goes fine, notifications are received.

5. I thought we were ready, so we created another AppId called "AppMaster", and enable Push Notification only for production. This Id is written in the app's bundle identifier.

6. We made another Provisioning for production named "appMaster" from AppId in step 5, with distribution method set as "App Store". downloaded it and rebuild app. This one was submitted to apple, and goes alive on app-stroe.

7. Server side, We downloaded the certification for production and write out the .p12 file again. and made program to push message to production server by using the api -- withProductionDestination(), with the .p12 just been write out.

8. We installed the app from App Store. sadly, the notification was never delivered.

Is there something we missed? BTW, the id we created in step5 was looks like "XXX.com.company.appname", but in the app's bundle identifier, we just set "com.company.appname" part without prefix. is this could be the problem?

any idea is welcomed.

please be our saver. thanks.

Answer 1

The comment above is incorrect. The app ID has a prefix before the bundle ID :

An application ID consists of an application’s bundle ID prefixed with a ten-character code generated by Apple. The team admin must enter the bundle ID. For a certificate, it must incorporate a specific bundle ID; you cannot use a “wildcard” application ID.

You should check your provisioning profile, to make sure it contains the correct aps entitlement :

Verify that the entitlements in the provisioning-profile file are correct. To do this, open the .mobileprovision file in a text editor. The contents of the file are structured in XML. In the Entitlements dictionary locate the aps-environment key. For a development provisioning profile, the string value of this key should be development; for a distribution provisioning profile, the string value should be production.

You should make sure you are using production device tokens when sending push notifications to the production APNS server (device tokens that works in the sandbox environment don't work in the production env).

You should have tested your app with an AdHoc provisioning profile prior to releasing it to the app store. The AdHoc profile works with the production push environment.

EDIT :

Some quotes regarding device tokens :

From the Local and Push Notification Programming Guide :

Take note that the device token in the production environment and the device token in the development (sandbox) environment are not the same value.

From Technical Note TN2265 :

Handling Malformed Notifications

The simple binary interface drops the connection if the push service receives a notification that is incorrect in some way. Your provider may see this as an EPIPE or broken pipe error in response to sending a notification. On the other hand, the enhanced binary interface will send an error response with more detailed information about what was wrong with the notification before dropping the connection. Be sure your provider catches and handles these conditions properly.

The most common problem is an invalid device token. If the token came from the sandbox environment, such as when you are testing a development build in house, you can't send it to the production push service. Each push environment will issue a different token for the same device or computer. If you do send a device token to the wrong environment, the push service will see that as an invalid token and discard the notification.

Finally, this article has a good explanation of how sending multiple notifications to Apple when some of the notifications are invalid (the most common cause being invalid device tokens), can cause some of the valid notifications not to arrive as well.