Handle silent push notification in closed react-native app (Android)?

Question

I'm working on a react-native app that is closed the majority of the time. However, I need to be able to send updates from the backend to different clients so they can update local geofences.

I figured I could use silent push notifications for this (using FCM). This appears to work fine when the app is running (either in the foreground or background), but when the app is closed, I am unable to handle these push notifications.

I'm able to handle normal push notifications while the app is closed, because when the user presses the notification, the app is launched and the notification is available as the initial notification, but this isn't an option with silent notifications.

Is there any way to have my app handle silent push notifications while closed? Either by opening in the background, handling the notification, and closing or by registering some kind of background service?

Answer 1

You may want to take a look at react-native-push-notification#silent

Basically for android:

If your Android app is not running when a silent notification is received then this library will start it. It will be started in the background however, and if the OS starts your app in this way it will not start the react-native lifecycle. This means that if your notification delivery code relies on the react-native lifecycle then it will not get invoked in this situation. You need to structure your app in such a way that PushNotification.configure gets called as a side effect of merely importing the root index.android.js file.

And IOS:

The crucial bit of an iOS silent notification is presence of the "content-available": 1 field.