No notifications

Hello,
I don't have any notifications when a chat comes on IOS. Notification apps in Nextcloud is enabled and Notification is allowed for Nextcloud Talk in IOS.

[Ivansss]

Hi @tomaaa ,
At the moment, there are only notifications for calls, invitations and chat mentions.

Hi Ivansss,
thanks for your reply. I don't get any notifications for calls also.

[Ivansss]

Ok... 🤔
I read your post here: https://help.nextcloud.com/t/no-notifications-nextcloud-talk-ios-chat/32642
Did you try to log-out and log-in again?
Also, you could try to log-out, then remove all the sessions of the Nextcloud Talk app from the web UI (Settings->Security) and reinstall the iOS app.

[Patate2]

I tried that. and.... no, nothing, niet, nada.
I'm crying.

[mario]

Do you have the notifications app installed on the server?

[Ivansss]

@Patate2 could you create a test account in your instance and send it to ivan AT nextcloud DOT com?
So I could debug what could be wrong in the subscription process?

[jsalort]

Hello,
I experience the same problem as described, but I wonder if notifications can really work at all.

Maybe I don't understand correctly, because this document at Apple is quite dense and I may not have read it with enough care,
APN Review

But from what I understand, it says that Apple Push Notifications work by allowing a provider server, which is linked to the developer Apple account, to send notification to the Apple Notification Service, which in the end sends the notification to the iOS device.

How can this work out-of-the-box on a self-hosted instance, if one does not have an Apple Developer Account ? And there is no settings that I am aware of in the Nextcloud settings to save my Apple ID.
Are notifications supposed to work out of the box, or is there something to install on the instance (besides the Notifications app and the Nextcloud Talk app) ?

Or are you using a third party server (presumably at nextcloud.com) to act as a gateway to send notifications for everybody with your own Apple developer certificates ? If so, it should be stated in the documentation, as people might not expect that and should be allowed to opt out.

@Ivansss: have @tomaaa created a test account on his instance already, or are you possibly interested in my creating a test account on mine ?

[mario]

The notifications are supposed to work out of the box as we use a Nextcloud-company-hosted service that sends the push messages through Google/Apple.

All data sent is encrypted, as you can check in the notifications app.

[jsalort]

@mario: OK, I understand. Thanks for the clarification.

So, if I understand, you send a POST request to kNCPushServer to subscribe the device to the Nextcloud-company-hosted notification service at push-notifications.nextcloud.com.
I guess the Notification app running on the instance already knows about this, and takes care of sending push notification to push-notifications.nextcloud.com (even if it is not clearly stated in the Notification app description that requests are going to be sent to a third-party server).

So, to track down where the notification gets lost, I suppose it should be possible to provide you with some log history:

• Is there a way to log into this nextcloud-hosted service, in order to verify that the registration was indeed successful ?
• Are there log files written by the Notification app on the instance, where it would be possible to check that push requests are successfully sent to push-notifications.nextcloud.com ?

[mario]

@jsalort the push server URL is coded inside the respective apps (e.g. iOS in this instance), not in the Notifications app. As for the logs: You could connect your phone to xcode, delete the account, and then re-add it. You should see if the registration process works then I think.

[jsalort]

the push server URL is coded inside the respective apps (e.g. iOS in this instance), not in the Notifications app.

@mario OK, that means that I still don't fully grasp how this works.
I get notified in a chat. This happens on the instance. The instance can't directly tell Apple Notification Service because it does not have credentials and certificate. The nextcloud-company-hosted service holds a certificate and pushes the notification to Apple Notification Service. How does the nextcloud-company-hosted service know that I was notified in a chat ?

You could connect your phone to xcode, delete the account, and then re-add it. You should see if the registration process works then I think.

OK. I am not sure what to look for, but it seems that everything is fine from this end:

VideoCalls	[com.nextcloud.Talk] Requesting token for remote notifications
VideoCalls	[com.nextcloud.Talk] Requested token for remote notifications [ didSucceed: 1 hasError: 0 hasCompletionHandler: 1 ]
VideoCalls	[com.nextcloud.Talk] Did receive remote notification token
VideoCalls	[com.nextcloud.Talk] Sending received device token to delegate UIApplication
VideoCalls	[com.nextcloud.Talk] Requested authorization [ didGrant: 1 hasError: 0 hasCompletionHandler: 1 ]

[...]

VideoCalls	4.13.0 - [Firebase/Messaging][I-FCM001000] FIRMessaging Remote Notifications proxy enabled, will swizzle remote notification receiver handlers. If you'd prefer to manually integrate Firebase Messaging, add "FirebaseAppDelegateProxyEnabled" to your Info.plist, and set it to NO. Follow the instructions at:
https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud-messaging/ios/client#method_swizzling_in_firebase_messaging
to ensure proper integration.
VideoCalls	Push Notifications Key Pair generated: 

But is this expected that there is a direct connect to the notification API, and that it is "cancelled" (whatever that means):

VideoCalls	[3 <private> stream, pid: 15091, url: https://myserver-hidden.com/ocs/v2.php/apps/notifications/api/v2/push, tls] cancelled
	[3.1 67096779-F5D0-4277-B283-E5B1E04619FD <private>.59508<-><private>]
	Connected Path: satisfied (Path is satisfied), interface: en0, ipv4, ipv6, dns
	Duration: 0.552s, DNS @0.004s took 0.030s, TCP @0.051s took 0.016s, TLS took 0.018s
	bytes in/out: 1330/1674, packets in/out: 5/4, rtt: 0.026s, retransmitted packets: 0, out-of-order packets: 0

[mario]

For some reason (and I didn't code the iOS part, though I know most about push I guess) the registration process for push with your server fails (e.g. connection is cancelled). How did you login? Did you use the usual login flow?

The nextcloud-company-hosted-service has absolutely NO IDEA you were mentioned in a chat. All it knows is that your Nextcloud instance wants to send you (and others) some message. That message IS encrypted.

[jsalort]

For some reason (and I didn't code the iOS part, though I know most about push I guess) the registration process for push with your server fails (e.g. connection is cancelled).

Ah interesting.
So I logged out and back in again, and this time I also tracked my Apache log.
And there it is:

 - [11/Jul/2018:23:34:21 +0200] "POST /index.php/login/flow HTTP/1.1" 303 1111 "-" "Columbus (Nextcloud Talk)"
 jsalort [11/Jul/2018:23:34:22 +0200] "POST /ocs/v2.php/apps/notifications/api/v2/push HTTP/1.1" 400 1303 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iOS) Nextcloud-Talk v2.1.0"
 jsalort [11/Jul/2018:23:34:22 +0200] "GET /ocs/v1.php/cloud/user?fomat=json HTTP/1.1" 200 1579 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iOS) Nextcloud-Talk v2.1.0"
 jsalort [11/Jul/2018:23:34:22 +0200] "GET /ocs/v2.php/apps/spreed/api/v1/room HTTP/1.1" 200 1552 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iOS) Nextcloud-Talk v2.1.0"
 jsalort [11/Jul/2018:23:34:22 +0200] "GET /ocs/v1.php/cloud/user?fomat=json HTTP/1.1" 200 1228 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iOS) Nextcloud-Talk v2.1.0"

It looks like login is fine, but the status code 400 on the POST request is presumably the cause of the malfunction... It would be interesting to know if others reporting the same issue have also this 400 status code. Could this be a configuration problem of my instance ? Or is it an issue in the way the iOS app builds this particular request ?

How did you login? Did you use the usual login flow?

Yes. This is the usual login flow: the iOS app shows a webview asking me to grant access to the app, I click "Grant" and then enter my credentials. And I see the right POST request in the Apache log.

The nextcloud-company-hosted-service has absolutely NO IDEA you were mentioned in a chat. All it knows is that your Nextcloud instance wants to send you (and others) some message. That message IS encrypted.

OK, I understand the encryption part. So, let me rephrase the question: how does the nextcloud-company-hosted service knows that my Nextcloud instance wants to send me (and others) some message ? There still needs to be some request sent from my instance to the nextcloud-company-hosted service, and the service has to accept it and relay...

[mario]

Error 400 means this:

Invalid device public key; device does not use a token to authenticate; the push token hash is invalid formatted; the proxy server URL is invalid;

@jsalort what version of Nc, what version of the notifications app?

As for the push:

• when you add an account, your device generates a device-specific keypair that is used to encrypt messages
• you register for push messages both at the Nextcloud server (your own) and at the nextcloud-company-hosted-push-magic-service
• Nextcloud server informs nextcloud-company-hosted-push-magic-service that you it wants to send a push message to one (or more) of the users on your server about a certain event

I hope that clarifies it!