📱 Anyone with a recent iPhone want to help the eHealth Forum go App?

Forum Stuff
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Apple have finally moved to implement an international standard for push notifications from web apps - like the eHealth Forum. This is exciting for me as the chap doing the admin, as folk can get a full ‘App’ experience (minus going through the AppStore) for chat and the like.

For those interested in the technical side of things:

So, why do we need someone with an iPhone? To test this out and make sure we are ready for when this goes live for most iPhone (8 onwards) users in a month or so. This will mean we can enter a new phase of an App experience for all of those who want it, including using the eHealth Forum as an ‘Event App’.

Specifics

A proud owner of an iPhone 8 or later (or iPad Pro or later) who is prepared to sign up for and utilise a beta testing account to put this through its paces. There is certainly room for more than one, and it would be great to have both Phone and Pad covered.

We’d collaborate together openly to get it working smoothly. The reward will be a warm fuzzy feeling for making a real contribution to the community - and if you are lucky some thanks and kudos from grateful members. On a serious note, you’ll learn about PWAs in some depth as well as some gold on how notifications and apps interact. Would look good on a CV (especially a student one!)

3 Likes
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I am on 16.3.1 iOS. I’d love to help out. I get the concept but never done testing stuff!

Can you estimate how much time it would need? I’m iPhone btw.

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Not a lot of time I don’t think. More the disruption of having to mess with your phone, and think / muck about with it / report back / etc.

If you’ve got the spare mental space / energy this is what you have to do:

  1. Install the iOS 16.4 beta (instructions here)
  2. Enable Web Push and Notifications on iOS Safari advanced settings
  3. Add the eHealth Forum app to your home screen
    • do this by opening up the Forum on your phone in Safari (forum.hinz.org.nz) - it should be in the Safari options
  4. Launch from the newly create home screen shortcut
  5. Log in again, since those don’t share cookies with Safari
  6. Enable notifications in the consent banner or via ehealthforum.nz/my/preferences/notifications
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Hey Nathan. All done. Already noticed some APPs struggling with the beta iOS!

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Yeah - I guess that is the true price that you’ll pay for testing this out. Thank you!

Have you had chance to install the eHealth Forum app? And test the notifications?

If you take some screenshots while you do it would be brilliant.

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So, I just had a “2” notifications on the APP; so yes it’s working. I’ll take screenshots this week.

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Happy to Nathan and already running Public Beta and have run developer beta in past but would rather stick with public beta 16.4

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Hi Nathan, the notifications don’t seem to be pushed all of the time. Only when I have the phone open and doing something on it. There is no number of messages shown. iPhone 14 using latest public beta.

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It is out of Beta now - so should be all good on that front.

You enabled Web Push in the Safari settings?

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Yes to enabling it. It does work when the phone is being used just not when not. I am running a beta usually one ahead of the public release