This is such an important feature to me, as a person who really likes to engage in back and forth comment conversations, timely responses are immensely helpful, and only feasible with notifications.
I’m aware there are on going costs, personally I’m happy to pay a couple of bucks a month for push notifications alone. More if other features are also included.
I do plan to support push notifications in Arctic, though I’ll need some time to setup a server for this. Unfortunately push notifications will require a subscription modal for Arctic which I have not yet decided how I want to handle that.
I am planning to start working on the server soon, and I’ll likely include the service for free in the TestFlight builds until the AppStore version is released.
Lemmios has Push Notifications for a very long time like months as the first and only app back then, but I don’t know how they are implemented. The app was not updated for months, but the push notifications are instant. Are they using a server?
Edit: 3 months, here is the announcement post back then: https://feddit.de/post/1488617
Yes, push notifications on iOS require a server running to monitor and send notifications to the device through Apples servers. During TestFlight with a small user base, I can offer this for free as the server cost would be negligible. Once I release to the AppStore, and the user base increases, the server cost will grow and I’ll need to use a subscription modal to cover server costs.
That said, apple doesn’t allow for charging for notification service, so the subscription would need to bundle notifications with other premium features to allow charging for the service. I never planned on charging for any premium service for Arctic, so I need to come up with a modal for this.
Ideally I’d like to keep Arctic completely free, but that is likely not realistic long term.
I would happily pay for premium features including notifications.
I was just curious how Lemmios was the first app that offered realtime notifications since basically day 1, that’s why I linked it.