For the month of June, 50% of all revenue brought in from our Pushover apps for Android and iOS will be donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF is a non-profit organization dedicated to defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights.
If you’re already a Pushover user, we encourage you to learn more about the EFF and donate to protect your rights.
Note: This does not affect most Pushover users, only developers that have integrated Pushover into their applications or created Pushover libraries.
Starting April 15, 2013, our API will require a valid application token to be passed to our /1/sounds.json (or .xml) endpoint, similar to our messages and receipts endpoints. Requests without a valid application token will be rejected after April 15. Application and Pushover library authors are encouraged to take this change into consideration as soon as possible.
As a reminder, the results of this API endpoint should be cached for a reasonable length of time, such as 24 hours. Our sounds list does not change very often and calling it every time your application needs to present the list of sounds to your users is wasteful.
We are aware of a problem affecting some Pushover Android users where notifications are received twice, sometimes minutes apart. This problem appears to have started earlier this week.
This problem is not with the Pushover service directly, but is with Google’s notification servers and is also affecting some other Android applications using Google’s push service.
If Google does not resolve the problem soon, we will work around it by publishing an update to our Android app that suppresses these duplicate notifications. We apologize for the inconvenience.
We will update this post when we get more information.
Update (18:15 CST): We’ve released Pushover 1.6.2 for Android to work around Google’s problem. Users are encouraged to update and contact us if the duplicate message problem persists.
We’re happy to announce version 1.6 of our Android and iOS apps has been released and contains new features, notification sounds, and bug fixes.
Emergency-Priority Notifications
A major new feature of this version is support for emergency-priority notifications with our API. These types notifications are useful for network monitoring and dispatching systems where notifications must be acknowledged by the user and the alert (sound and/or vibration) must repeat at a certain interval for a specified duration until acknowledged.
Applications sending emergency-priority notifications can specify the retry interval (at least 30 seconds) and the amount of time the notification should keep repeating (up to 24 hours) until acknowledged. The details of using emergency-priority notifications can be found in our API documentation.
Applications needing information about emergency-priority notifications, such as whether they have been acknowledged and when, can use our new receipts and callback functionality. This allows server applications to poll for a notification’s status and receive details about it, or specify a callback URL that our servers will call out to as soon as the user acknowledges the notification.
Along with these new types of notifications, we’ve also added 5 new longer, louder alert sounds that were designed to be heard in loud environments, or to wake users from sleep (those poor on-call techs).
We expect this new functionality to be very beneficial to our many Pushover users using it with network monitoring applications.
Pebble Watch Support
The long-awaited Pebble smart watch has finally started shipping to its early adopters and we’re happy to announce support for it in Pushover. Version 1.6 of our Android client is one of the first apps to feature native Pebble support so you can opt to display all of your Pushover notifications right on your wrist.
This functionality requires the free Pebble app to be installed and paired with your watch. On iOS, Pushover has been confirmed to work with Pebble automatically, using the functionality of the installed Pebble app to forward all Notification Center alerts to your watch.
Other Changes
In addition to these features, we’ve also added a setting on our iOS app to allow links to be opened in the Chrome browser if it is installed. We’ve also fixed a few bugs and added workarounds for various Android devices.
We hope you enjoy this new release! As always, please feel free to contact us for support and if you find Pushover useful, we appreciate your positive iOS App Store and Android Play Store reviews and ratings.
Note: This issue only concerns developers that are directly communicating with our API. This does not affect users using 3rd party services like IFTTT to receive Pushover notifications.
Due to a recently discovered security concern in 3rd party software used by our API service, we’ve recently disabled inbound JSON and XML parameter parsing for requests to our API.
Please note that this does not affect receiving JSON or XML responses from our API (specified by the suffix of the URL you are accessing, such as https://api.pushover.net/1/messages.json) and only affects whether our API servers will parse parameters that you are sending encoded in JSON rather than percent-encoding.
We take security very seriously and have disabled this feature as a precaution, although we intend to keep it disabled after this point. This feature was used infrequently according to our API statistics, as most HTTP libraries and utilities like cURL encode POST data with percent- or form-style encoding, so most developers and users should not be affected by this change.
For questions about this change, please feel free to contact us directly.
Today we’ve released version 1.5.1 of our Pushover client for Android. This update adds widget functionality that allows you to display your Pushover notifications on your home screen and, on Android 4.2+, your lock screen.
Android 3 and 4 brought increased functionality to widgets, allowing them to be resized and interacted with much more than before. For Pushover, this means you can now scroll through your list of notifications inside the widget, and tap on one to open it in the Pushover client.
Android 4.2 Jelly Bean also brought lock-screen widget functionality, which allows certain widgets to be displayed while the phone is locked. For users that have more complex unlock methods such as a pattern or PIN/password, it can sometimes be a pain to unlock the phone to see Pushover notifications. Our new lock-screen widget allows you to add a Pushover widget to the lock screen and swipe to the right to see your new notifications without even having to unlock the phone. When you tap on a notification to expand or delete it, you will be required to unlock the phone first.
While more than 85% of Pushover users on Android are using devices with Android 4.0 or higher and benefit from our newer notification styles and widgets, we are committed to bringing as much functionality as we can to older devices running Android 2.3 or 3.0. As much of our widget utilizes new APIs only available in Android 4.0 and 4.2, our widget cannot be used on Android 2.3 with this release. We are working to backport some of the basic functionality to work on Android 2.3 and hope to include it with a future Pushover release.
An oft-requested feature from our users was the ability to send notifications with a custom sound, rather than always using our standard Pushover sound. While Android users were able to choose a different default sound from the list of ringtones on their devices, iOS users were not due to limitations in iOS’ notification system.
Today we’re happy to announce the release of version 1.5 of our Android and iOS clients which bundle 15 additional sounds that we had created for us:
Users on Android and iOS can now choose from the 15 new sounds to play as a default notification tone, and applications using our API can even specify a particular sound to play for each message sent. For example, a network monitor application can send “host down” notifications with one sound, and “host up” notifications with another sound.
Version 1.5 of our Android and iOS clients is now live in the Google Play Market and Apple App Store, though it may take a few hours to show up as an update for your devices.
We’ve also updated our Adium plugin to support choosing a notification sound, which can be used to apply different sounds to different events and contacts.
For application developers, we’re also introducing an API call that can be used to dynamically get the list of sounds we support. We recommend using this rather than hard-coding the list, since we may add additional sounds in future releases of our device clients. We encourage app developers to allow users to choose a custom sound to play for their application.
As always, we welcome your feedback on Pushover.
In response to user requests, we’ve implemented the ability to send quiet messages through our API regardless of a user’s quiet hours. These silent, low priority notifications are useful for sending progress updates or other information that doesn’t need to get the attention of the user right away.
To support sending low priority notifications, the priority parameter of our message API now allows a value of -1. The default is 0, and 1 triggers a high-priority alert that always generates sound and vibration.
Just like messages received during a user’s quiet hours, low priority notifications will not trigger sound or vibration on devices. On Android, these messages will still appear in the notification bar. On iOS, these messages will only trigger an increase of the Pushover app’s badge number.
3rd party developers of Pushover utilities and libraries: you may need to update your code to allow passing a priority as an integer if it is currently being interpreted/stored as a boolean value. In the future, we may also support a priority value of 2 to take more drastic attention-getting measures, so now would be a good time to ensure your code supports more than a 0 or 1 value.
We’ve released version 1.4 of our Android and iOS apps today, which now support setting and receiving messages during “quiet hours”.
Quiet hours are periods of time during which Pushover notifications should not generate sounds or vibration, but should still notify your device. On Android, notifications will still appear in the notification bar, and on iOS, the Pushover app icon will display a badge with the number of unread notifications.
Messages sent through our API with the “priority” flag set to 1 will override quiet hours and always generate sounds. This is useful for network monitors and other high priority applications that always need to generate notifications.
You can adjust your quiet hours from the Pushover website, or through the Settings in our apps. Quiet hours affect all devices on your account.
In addition to supporting quiet hours, our Android app now uses the notification enhancements that came with Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), such as larger text areas, per-application icons, and a button that will open a message’s supplementary URL (if supplied) right from the notification.
Pushover 1.4 for iOS is available in the App Store now, and Pushover 1.4.1 for Android is available on the Google Play Market.
IFTTT is a web service that lets you create powerful connections with one simple statement:
Using IFTTT’s library of triggers (the “this” part), you can create simple-but-powerful recipes to automatically perform actions any time certain things happen. For instance, every time you post a photo to Instagram, IFTTT can automatically save it to your Dropbox.
Earlier this week, IFTTT announced a new Pushover channel, enabling you to easily send Pushover notifications when your recipes trigger. Users have already created hundreds of recipes using the power of Pushover’s instant notifications, such as:
- If the front door opens, send a Pushover notification
- Notify me when I’m tagged in a Facebook picture
- Send me a high-priority notification when new e-mails arrive from VIPs
- Get notified of new Gold medals in the Olympic Games
We’re excited to see these new creative uses for Pushover, and we’d like to welcome all of our new users from IFTTT. If you’ve never used IFTTT before, signup and start making recipes. If you’re new to Pushover, check out some of the other applications that are Pushover enabled, or integrate it into your own application.
