iOS Beacon ranging whenever needed

Question

As stated clearly in Apple docs, beacon ranging can be done in background for a short period of time only, say up to 10 seconds by default or up to 3 minutes with the help of background task expiration handler. As per my app's use case, app needs to do beacon ranging for every 15 mins until user exits the region. I am thinking of using background push notification(silent push notification) for this purpose(assuming data connection is available on the device always). So the flow goes like this, upon user entering the region, app calls the server with device token, server sends silent push notification for every 15 minutes. Once app received push notification, it does beacon ranging within allowed period of time if needed. Question I have here is whether using push notification in background mode to do ranging is legal, will I face any issues during app store submission.

Note: Also I need to enable BLE background mode for the app, to read some characteristics from some BLE devices.

Dordogne

Answer 1

If you misuse one of the background modes, the app will probably be rejected, saying that, I don't think silent push notifications were meant for: keep an iOS app in "Background" state by sending it a silent push notification every few minutes.

another thing is that silent push notifications are rate limited as described http://asciiwwdc.com/search?q=push+notification, so I'm not sure if they will be sent every few minutes.

Apple says that;

Silent notifications are not meant as a way to keep your app awake in the background, nor are they meant for high priority updates. APNs treats silent notifications as low priority and may throttle their delivery altogether if the total number becomes excessive. The actual limits are dynamic and can change based on conditions, but try not to send more than a few notifications per hour.

Botanize

Answer 2

Technically you can do it, but Apple mostly rejects such app. One important thing you have to consider is that, if the app is manually killed by the user and not running in the background, then the app won't wake up with silent push notification. There is a workaround if you have VoIP push notifications it will wake the app even from the terminated state. But you might need strong reason while pushing it to AppStore.

Penang

Answer 3

You might want to see this article. The user talks about apps that use silent notification for triggering location tracking. But eventually it's a hack that Apple may reject some time in the future, so it's best to have a contingency plan. FWIW so far I haven't heard anyone reporting rejection.

So the official answer is don't do it, as for the why you can refer to Ashish's answer. The unofficial answer is if you can't change your business logic then do it at your own risk.

Gwenngwenneth

Answer 4

The iOS application I'm working on does the exact same thing with the exception that I'm using recording instead of a Beacon. Recording by iOS standards gives more issues in pushing the app to the app store.

But Apple did not reject this app. Although we still are facing some issues but they don't relate to your problem. You can follow such a tutorial for further help apart from the answer you were looking for : iOS Push Notification Demysitfied

Also, I've done firing of local notifications, while the application is in the background. BLE even works if the app is killed by the system, when the OS receives some communication from your peripheral or central, iOS wakes your app up and executes the desired function, before putting your app back to sleep.

Matthaus