ntfy iOS support is about to get much better. While I haven’t worked on the native app in a while, the progressive web app (PWA) is going to make the web app enough to receive notifications on iOS (and others).
Almost all of the credit goes to @nimbleghost for the implementation.
Yeah that’s fair. The experience is not great. I hear ya.
Those are two different issues:
Re “New message”: When you publish to your selfhosted server, it forwards a “poll request” to ntfy.sh, which sends that to APNS (Apple notification service), which forwards that to your phone. The “poll request” only contains the message ID to protect your privacy. The iOS app then contacts your home server to receive the actual message. If the iOS app cannot do that in time, or your server is not reachable, it must still show a notification (iOS restriction), so it shows “New message”. This is not ideal, and could in the future be solved by end-to-end encryption.
Re “no updating UI”: This is a known issue (see https://docs.ntfy.sh/known-issues/#ios-app-not-refreshing-see-267). It’s basically just related to me not knowing how iOS development works. I tried and tried and tried and I couldn’t get it to reliably update the UI. It’s related to the fact that the iOS Notification Service Extension (NSE) – the thing that receives the notification – runs in a different process as the app, and has to notify the app to update the UI. It’s super weird.
– Anyway. Sorry about that.