Open Radar

 
Summary:
We, developers of the Pebble smartwatch accessory, would like to see an additional ANCS notification attribute that would provide access to the (JSON) payload of a Remote Notification (see http://apple.co/1IwsZ6e).

The end goal we have in mind, is to enable ANCS-capable accessories to enrich the information as delivered by ANCS. Examples of ways we envision to enrich ANCS notifications: taking actions, quick replies, looking up more information, etc.

Developers have been using the JSON push notification payload to provide additional metadata to their app since the introduction of push notifications. Unfortunately, this metadata does not get transferred to ANCS accessories. This metadata that is part of the JSON push notification payload is the missing key part in enabling developers to build a layer on top of ANCS-enabled devices (not limited to Pebble). Using the existing push notifications infrastructure that developers already known and already have in place, makes a lot of sense in our opinion.

Currently, the only option to enrich the notification experience from the ANCS accessory (i.e. to reply to a notification, invoke actions, etc.) requires building out a separate data channel from each individual developer (Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.) to the ANCS accessory. This channel could then be used to deliver the additional information about the received ANCS notifications. Aside of being inefficient, this solution is also very hard to realize because of a variety of reasons: 1) ANCS notifications currently do not have any developer-specific metadata (this is what the JSON payload is intended for), so there is no way to refer back to a notification, other than by the actual body text of the notification (bad idea). 2) building a separate data channel means significant work for each developer that wants to integrate with the accessory.

If ANCS would give access to the APNS JSON payload, all we would need to do is ask the developers to add metadata into the payload that the accessory can parse in order to enrich the notification.

One could argue that making the JSON push notification payload available through ANCS introduces a privacy and data security problem. Our argument against this is the information that can be obtained from ANCS can already be very sensitive in terms of privacy / security. For example: 2 factor auth codes, one time passwords, etc. already get sent to people via SMS or through push notifications. Those sensitive pieces of information already get transported to accessories over ANCS, being part of the human readable body text of the notifications. We don't see how the JSON payload is different in this regard. In the end it all comes down to our customers having trust in the accessory that connects to their phones. We're are very aware of this and do our very best to protect the customers' privacy and information security.

Steps to Reproduce:
N/A

Expected Results:
N/A

Actual Results:
N/A

Version:
iOS 8.3

Notes:


Configuration:
iPhone 6+

Attachments: