Background running & notifications

[danlatorre]

For basic use with people I collaborate with it would be a basic feature and perhaps a hard sell to get more (non-tech) people using this until background running features to support notifications while in other apps can be set up. Along with audio alerts.

With these features it would be much easier to get people to shift form SMS to using ChatSecure. Which would be a huge boost in... event planning and on the ground coordinating during events.

[chrisballinger]

The best I can do is similar to the backgrounding in the Verbs app (w/o push message), where it will time out after 10 minutes unless you restart the app. This is definitely one of the top priorities for the next release!

[danlatorre]

Does that mean the iOS policy won't let you do push messages for this type of app? Or is it a security protection issue? Thinking of all the people who really need this that are so busy and having chats that can't always be synchronous when chatting, having this be like SMS user experience would be a killer feature.

[danlatorre]

FWIW I and many I know would totally pay $4.99 for push notifications in ChatSecure.

[chrisballinger]

True Apple-style "push messaging" relies on (me) running a third party server that would act as the XMPP/OTR client and interact with Apple's Push server. It would require me to store everyone's full login credentials in plaintext as well. Supporting that feature would be a disservice because it would create a critical point of failure and would allow for messages to be intercepted by Apple.

There might be a workaround for jailbroken iPhones to remove the 10 minute limit, though.
http://sparrowmailapp.com/push.php
http://www.3gunrestrictor.com/SparrowPush/

[danlatorre]

Ahh, I see. Right yeah Sparrow had issues too with that headache (for other reasons). Definitely prefer security since that's the point with this. 10 minutes might be okay since things are organized so quickly a 10 minute lag would be not back to deal with during an event.

[chrisballinger]

Just to be clear there wouldn't be any lag when the App is in the background (you'd see the notifications immediately), but if you left it in the background for longer than 10 minutes you would no longer see any notifications and it would essentially log you off. Verbs has an option to prompt the user before the 10 minutes is up to remind them to relaunch the app which I might consider adding as well.

[danlatorre]

That would be great, never used Verbs, but that sounds like a smart compromise.

[chrisballinger]

Added background messaging support in 464920e

Look for it in the next release! :)