No one is asking for a survey of apps that do this. You’re making the claim that it’s far from rare, so you have enough knowledge to make this claim. Share with us the smallest piece of your knowledge by naming one single other app that does this. It’s the least you can do since you’re making the claim. Please, I’m very curious!

I'm curious as well.

I really think you’ve missed the point. Opening any of those apps after receiving the notification requires a network connection to then update. It’s not done via the push notification itself. I have never seen that happen in my experience. Flighty does, hence why it’s deemed clever.

I have not missed the point.

Background notifications can and do carry arbitrary application data, and are used to update the application state in the background.

This is their intended purpose, it’s what they’re documented to do, it’s how Apple intends them to be used, and it’s common application behavior.

This is literally a plainly documented feature of the platform. It’s not clever or unique or unusual — it’s a simple feature that Apple specifically documents.

I cannot even begin to fathom why people are confused about this, and it’s truly mind-boggling that this has required a thread at all.

Slack/Discord/Teams are non-native applications that do not leverage the platform’s support for updating application state via notifications. That does not mean the use of background notifications is unusual or rare. It is not.

Uh, all those apps have mobile counterparts.

> I cannot share information about specific applications.

So you don't have an example of an app using such a basic and widespread feature? Ok.

A mobile webapp is still a webapp, and “I cannot share” does not mean “I do not have”.

You’re the one with an extraordinary claim here — that applications aren’t using such a basic, documented, widespread feature.

It’s patently silly and I have no idea why you’re so self-assured in your ignorance.