Android GCM delivery monitoring

Question

I am developing mobile client for emailing service. One of the key features is notifications about new messages in the mailbox. As recommended by GCM architecture guidelines

Answer 1

The only way to do so is to report back to your server with the timestamp of the received push.

You can either

1. Report back to the server once you receive the notification in your GCM service. To implement, you will have to add a push id for your push notifications and send the id along with the push data. The client will have to get the timestamp once it receive the message and send it back along with the notification id. A simple php script can be done (when you send a push notification, you set the time of the send-notification and once it receives the device's timestamp it sets the receive-notification. This boils down to two fields in your database (marked in bold). In this approach you will probably not so much care about errors since it is very probable that the device will have a connection when it receives the notification and as such its request to your server will go through.

2. Keep a list of notifications received in your app and their timestamps. And when the sync is done, send the this data in your sync operation. This is ultimately the same approach but your server's data won't be as realtime as the first approach. However, the extra request is not required from the client's side but saving the received notifications and their timestamps is.

All in all, you will have to keep track of the notifications sent using a notification-id and their sending time (send-notification) and their receive time (receive-notification). A simple query will help you analyze this data.