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practiseSafeHex
5y

So I've been screaming for months that push notifications are not reliable enough to build critical functionality on top of. Management won't listen and keep pushing ahead with making teams use it because its cheap and easy.

Been debugging an issue on/off for several weeks. Turns out someone in management asked the backend team to cut the expiration time of items down to 5 minutes to increase throughput (without telling mobile). Notifications are regularly taking +4 mins to get to the phones, leaving our users with barely any time to react. They are now complaining.

I swear if there is a single IQ point available between the whole team i've yet to see any evidence of it

rant

push notifications

management

idiots

timing
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  • 10
    5y
    Why wouldn't you use push notifications for critical feature?! They are great, here, I will show you. The app's name is Duolingo...
  • 1
    5y
    mostly agree they are not reliable for critical functionalities.
    But what else would you propose?
  • 1
    5y
    On a business decision cost is a factor mostly. SMS is expensive and sometimes just as unreliable in cases.
    Love the last line of your rant!! Haha. 👌🏼
  • 2
    5y
    Yes other options like sms are expensive but how expensive is it to have your service not working and a team of devs doing nothing but repeatedly debugging it because management won’t accept it.

    In our particular case we need web sockets. We are sending a large number of push notifications to keep refreshing screens and keeping users up to date with status changes.

    Backend have said it will take too long to change everything to websockets ... so we aren’t
  • 1
    5y
    @badcopnodonuts if the user isn’t gonna pay attention either way it doesn’t matter what notif you pick
  • 0
    5y
    @practiseSafeHex lol wow.. nothing like building solid solutions

    And can they just build a websocket layer only for notifications?
  • 1
    5y
    @badcopnodonuts there are a few places we still need to use notifications. But yes there are many uses cases where a straight swap to websockets would fix it. But I don’t think the backend is architected in a way to make that easy
  • 0
    5y
    @Boogie you made me laugh with your duolingo element of surprise.
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