Dear Apple Developer Support Team,
I am writing regarding critical issues we are facing with Safari web push notifications in our application iLiveMyLife.io, which is severely impacting our ability to maintain reliable communication with our users.
Issue Description: We are experiencing persistent problems with Safari push notification tokens expiring or becoming invalid without any notification to our server. This creates several critical issues:
- Users stop receiving notifications without any indication of failure
- Our notification delivery system has no way to detect token expiration
- The expiration appears to happen frequently (seemingly almost daily in some cases)
- There is no reliable mechanism to re-establish push communication without users manually revisiting the app
Technical Impact:
- Our messaging functionality becomes completely unreliable
- We must resort to email or SMS as fallback mechanisms, which is not feasible for a real-time communication platform
- This makes building any reliable messaging application on Safari practically impossible
The Broader Context: What makes this situation particularly challenging is that all potential alternative browser APIs that could help address this issue appear to be deliberately disabled or restricted in Safari:
- Background Service Workers don't function in the background on iOS Safari
- Background Sync API is not supported
- WebSockets cannot operate when the app is closed
- There's no way to programmatically check the validity of push tokens
The combination of these limitations creates a situation where developers have no viable technical path to build reliable notification systems for PWAs on Safari. This appears to be a systematic restriction rather than individual API limitations.
Requested Information:
- Is there a recommended approach to detect Safari push token expiration?
- Are there alternative notification mechanisms for PWA applications on Safari that offer more reliability?
- Is there documentation on the lifecycle of Safari push tokens that could help us implement proper handling?
- Are there plans to improve the Web Push API implementation in Safari to address these reliability issues?
- Could you clarify if these limitations are intentional design decisions or technical constraints that might be addressed in future updates?
Business Impact: This issue fundamentally undermines our platform's core functionality. For a collaborative tool, reliable notifications are essential - users cannot collaborate effectively if they miss updates because their push tokens silently expired. The current state creates confusion among our users, who don't understand why they suddenly stop receiving notifications.
Any guidance or assistance you could provide would be greatly appreciated. We're committed to providing an excellent experience on Safari, but the current push notification limitations make this extremely challenging.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Best regards, Ilya