How can I determine if a user has ever seen the dialog asking for push notification permission (ios)

Question

I am aware of enabledremotenotificationtypes, but it does not help me because if I receive enabledremotenotificationtypes == UIRemoteNotificationTypeNone, there's no way for me to tell if the user has 1. accepted push notifications once but then turned it off via setting later OR 2. rejected push notifications OR 3. never seen the blue dialog asking for permission. I need a way to differentiate these three cases.

Any help will be really appreciated.

Answer 1

The solution is a bit of a hack, but it does work. You need to call registerUserNotificationSettings for two different notificationSettings - one without a notificationCategory and one with a notificationCategory:

    //Request notification permission
UIUserNotificationSettings *notificationSettings = [UIUserNotificationSettings settingsForTypes:UIUserNotificationTypeAlert | UIUserNotificationTypeBadge | UIUserNotificationTypeSound categories:nil];
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] registerUserNotificationSettings:notificationSettings];

//Request notification permission again, but with a category with no actions
UIMutableUserNotificationCategory *category = [[UIMutableUserNotificationCategory alloc] init];
category.identifier = @"com.xyz.markNotificationPopupShownCategoryIdentifier";

UIUserNotificationSettings *notificationSettingsWithCategory = [UIUserNotificationSettings settingsForTypes:UIUserNotificationTypeAlert | UIUserNotificationTypeBadge | UIUserNotificationTypeSound categories:[NSSet setWithObject:category]];
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] registerUserNotificationSettings:notificationSettingsWithCategory];

The didRegisterUserNotificationSettings:(UIUserNotificationSettings *)notificationSettings method in the app delegate will be called two times, and irrespective of the user's answer in the permission notification, after the second call, the current notification settings will contain the category. As long as the category count is greater than 0, you can know for sure that the notifications permission dialog has been shown:

if ([UIApplication sharedApplication].currentUserNotificationSettings.categories.count > 0) {
    NSLog(@"Notifications permissions has been asked");
} else {
    NSLog(@"Notifications permissions hasn't been asked");
}