Pushover Updates

API Change: Application Token Required for Sounds Request

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 12:39:00 -0500

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.

Duplicate Message Problem on Android

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 12:04:00 -0600

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.

Version 1.6: Emergency-Priority Notifications, Receipts, Callbacks, and Pebble Support

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:02:17 -0600

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.

API inbound JSON/XML parameter parsing disabled

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 02:07:00 -0600

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.

Android widgets

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 16:52:10 -0600

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.

Per-notification Sounds

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 10:33:10 -0600

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:

Bike
Bugle
Cash Register
Classical
Cosmic
Falling
Gamelan
Incoming
Intermission
Magic
Mechanical
Piano Bar
Siren
Space Alarm
Tug Boat

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.

Sending quiet messages through the API

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 23:05:00 -0500

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.

Quiet Hours and Jelly Bean Notifications

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 16:04:00 -0500

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.

If This Then Pushover

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 12:15:07 -0500

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.

New SSL Certificate for api.pushover.net

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 16:07:22 -0500

(Note: for most of our users, this change will have no effect and will not require any changes on your part.)

Our previous SSL certificate issuer for api.pushover.net and our pushover.net website is currently experiencing a DDoS attack on their OCSP servers, which browsers and other SSL clients use to check whether a given certificate has been revoked.

The result of that attack is that when a web browser or other SSL client with OCSP checking enabled tries to establish an SSL connection to api.pushover.net, it will stall for about 10 seconds while waiting to get a response from the OCSP server being attacked.

We’ve switched to a new SSL certificate provider with more robust OCSP servers, as well as registered new certificates valid for 2 years.

For most of our users, this change will not require any intervention and will not be noticeable. Our Android and iOS clients are working fine with the new certificate and most HTTP/SSL libraries/frameworks sending notifications through our API will not need to be notified of the new SSL certificate. However, some users using Java or other environments where a manual key store is needed may need to adapt to the new certificate provider.

We would have liked to have been able to give more notice before this change but due to the problems that the DDoS is causing on the SSL provider, we had to act quickly.

Realtime API Usage Statistics

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 10:39:48 -0500

We’re happy to announce that all Pushover applications now have realtime API usage statistics, viewable for the past 45 days.

When viewing your registered application’s details, you will now see an interactive graph showing how many messages were sent each day, along with the current month’s total.

You can see usage statistics for your applications now by visiting the Applications & Plugins page while logged in.

E-mail to Pushover Gateway

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 11:57:00 -0500

Pushover’s API makes it easy to integrate notifications into a wide variety of applications and services. Today we’re announcing an e-mail gateway that makes it possible to receive Pushover notifications from devices and services where API integration is not possible, such as with embedded devices, SAN servers, routers, and websites.

Our new e-mail gateway provides every Pushover user with an e-mail address that will turn any e-mails received into Pushover notifications. To get started, just send an e-mail to Your-Pushover-User-Key@api.pushover.net. By default, all notifications will be sent to all active devices on your account, just like other Pushover notifications. To have messages sent to only one particular device, use the e-mail address Your-Pushover-User-Key+Device-Name@api.pushover.net.

For example, if your user key were abcdefg12345 and you wanted to send a notification to your device iPhone, you would use the e-mail address abcdefg12345+iPhone@api.pushover.net.

HTML e-mails received by our gateway will be converted into plain-text with URLs preserved to enable them to be tapped on in the iOS and Android Pushover clients. Just like other Pushover notifications, e-mail notifications are limited to 512 characters and long e-mails will be truncated.

New API Feature: Supplemental URLs

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 21:21:00 -0500

A new feature has been added to our API and is now supported by version 1.3 of our Android and iOS clients: supplemental URLs.

As before, all URLs included in the Pushover message body will be automatically turned into tappable links when viewed on our device clients. Sometimes, however, it is useful to include a URL that is not the actual content of the message, may be too long, or may use a custom URL scheme that is not recognized.

For example, an application using Pushover to send Twitter messages to devices may include a supplemental URL of “twitter://direct_message link?screen_name=someuser” and a URL title of “Reply to @someuser”. When the message is expanded in the Pushover client, the user will be given the option of opening the supplemental URL, which in this case would launch a Twitter client installed on the device and send a direct message to “@someuser”.

For more information on using this new feature, check out our API documentation.

Please note that supplemental URLs require version 1.3 of our iOS and Android clients, both released today.

New Pushover app plugins for Github, Weechat, and Puppet

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 15:22:00 -0500

Github Service Hook
The first plugin is a Github service hook that sends a Pushover notification each time a commit is made to your git repositories. This plugin has been integrated into Github’s website so there’s nothing to install other than adding your Pushover user key.

To get started, view one of your repositories on Github. Click the Admin button in the upper right corner.
Next, click “Service Hooks”.
Scroll down and select Pushover.
Finally, enter your user key (available by logging into the Pushover website) and an optional device name (to restrict notifications to a single device on your account). Click “Update Settings” and you should start receiving notifications whenever a commit is made to that repository.

Weechat Plugin

Next up is a plugin for the Weechat IRC client, written by Pushover user James Turnbull. This plugin forwards private messages and highlights to your Pushover devices. To install, see James’ Github repo.

Puppet Report Processor

And finally, another plugin by Pushover user James Turnbull, a report processor for the Puppet automation tool. See the puppet-pushover repo for usage information.

Use Pushover's Adium plugin to receive IMs while you're away

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 11:58:00 -0600

Pushover has an official plugin for Adium that lets you forward instant messages to your mobile devices that were received on your computer while you are away.

To get started, install the Adium plugin from the Adium Xtras site. Once the plugin is installed, open the Adium preferences and click on the Events tab.

Double click on “Message Received” to expand it and then click the “+” button at the bottom of the preferences window. If the Pushover plugin was correctly installed, you’ll see a “Forward to Pushover” entry in the “Action” drop down.

Enter your Pushover user key (viewable at pushover.net or from the Settings of the client on your phone) and optional device name.

To receive all messages while your account is away, check the “Away” option. If you are frequently away but only want to receive messages while you’re actually away from your computer and the screen saver has started, check the “Screen is locked” option.

You can apply this action to other types of events, such as only when certain contacts send messages.

Welcome to Pushover

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:20:00 -0600

Pushover makes it easy to send push notifications from your servers, apps, websites, and anything else.

Clients are now available for Android and iOS in the Android Market and App Store.