Push Notifications on iOS

Helm iOS 2.3 is here, and it brings one of our most requested features yet: push notifications.

This has been in the works for a long time, and we are excited to finally ship it.

You can choose which apps you want to receive notifications for, as well as which types of notifications you want for each one.

We currently support notifications for:

• Your app’s version state changes.
• When a build finishes uploading.
• Your build’s state changes, for example when it is ready to test.
• New TestFlight feedback, including crashes and screenshots.

Set up Push Notifications

Setting up notifications is easy. Open the app, go to Settings, and scroll down to the Notifications section.

From there, you will see a list of all your apps and the notifications currently enabled for each one.

You can configure notifications for each app individually, or tap Select All in the toolbar to enable notifications for every app at once.

That’s it. You will now start receiving notifications from Helm on your phone.

A real team effort

This feature has been especially fun to work on because we got to collaborate with some incredibly talented people.

To build the backend that powers push notifications, we reached out to our friend Tim Condon, who helped us create an amazing Swift on the Server backend.

We also wanted to do this the Helm way, so we reached out to Josh Mobley, who beautifully designed each notification sound.

Even if your app gets rejected, you might still love the sound of the notification. You can listen to them all on his website.

When’s this coming to macOS?

You have been asking for this feature for a long time, and we have been working on it since WWDC last year, when Apple announced webhook support in the API.

We are just as excited as you are to bring it to macOS, but we have hit some technical limitations that prevent us from shipping it today.

Privacy is a priority for us, so the push notification backend is designed to keep your keys and private information securely on your device.

Because of that, the app has to enrich incoming notifications on-device with API data that only the app can access.

There is currently a bug preventing the technology behind this from working in native macOS apps.

We have filed feedback, and as soon as that bug is fixed, we will be able to ship notifications on macOS 🎉.

Other things we shipped

Alongside this iOS work, we also shipped a small update for our macOS app, version 2.3.4, with the following changes:

• Support for managing In-App Events from the CLI.
• Support for duplicating an In-App Purchase or Subscription from the CLI.
• Fixed an issue that would result in the Age Rating declaration not saving.
• Fixed an issue where creating a new In-App Purchase price change with no start date would result in overlapping schedules.
• Window restore and tray-open behavior on macOS is now more reliable, including window size, position, duplicate windows, and recovering the main window.