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Known issues

This is an incomplete list of known issues with the ntfy server, web app, Android app, and iOS app. You can find a complete list on GitHub, but I thought it may be helpful to have the prominent ones here to link to.

iOS app not refreshing (see #267)

For some (many?) users, the iOS app is not refreshing the view when new notifications come in. Until you manually swipe down, you do not see the newly arrived messages, even though the popup appeared before.

This is caused by some weirdness between the Notification Service Extension (NSE), SwiftUI and Core Data. I am entirely clueless on how to fix it, sadly, as it is ephemeral and not clear to me what is causing it.

Please send experienced iOS developers my way to help me figure this out.

iOS app not receiving notifications (anymore)

If notifications do not show up at all anymore, there are a few causes for it (that I know of):

Firebase+APNS are being weird and buggy:
If this is the case, usually it helps to remove the topic/subscription and re-add it. That will force Firebase to re-subscribe to the Firebase topic.

Self-hosted only: No upstream-base-url set, or base-url mismatch:
To make self-hosted servers work with the iOS app, I had to do some horrible things (see iOS instant notifications for details). Be sure that in your selfhosted server:

  • Set upstream-base-url: "https://ntfy.sh" (not your own hostname!)
  • Ensure that the URL you set in base-url matches exactly what you set the Default Server in iOS to

iOS app seeing "New message", but not real message content

If you see New message notifications on iOS, your iPhone can likely not talk to your self-hosted server. Be sure that your iOS device and your ntfy server are either on the same network, or that your phone can actually reach the server.

Turn on tracing/debugging on the server (via log-level: trace or log-level: debug, see troubleshooting), and read docs on iOS instant notifications.

Safari does not play sounds for web push notifications

Safari does not support playing sounds for web push notifications, and treats them all as silent. This will be fixed with iOS 17 / Safari 17, which will be released later in 2023.

PWA on iOS sometimes crashes with an IndexedDB error (see #787)

When resuming the installed PWA from the background, it sometimes crashes with an error from IndexedDB/Dexie, due to a WebKit bug. A reload will fix it until a permanent fix is found.