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Comment by sinak

11 years ago

My one big question is: does Zulip support push notifications to the next version of the mobile app if you self-host the server?

I'm not exactly sure how that'd be possible, but I wonder if they've managed to figure it out somehow. It's the one big problem with self-hosted chat apps like Rocket.chat and others - APNS and GCM are both centralized, and it's hard to federate them to provide push services for self-hosted instances of open source projects.

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sinak

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tabbott  11 years ago

I think there are two approaches one could take for doing this:

* It seems like one way you could make that possible would be to make it really easy to do white-label builds of the Zulip mobile apps. E.g. the "Zulip for example.com" app. Would be more overhead than is ideal for smaller deployments.

* It should be possible to have APNS/GCM traffic go through a central community-hosted service that dispatches the messages on to a set of configured Zulip servers.

We actually had functionality based on a similar concept for the Zulip desktop app login process, where it would query a service on zulip.com with e.g. "example.com" and that would return the URL of what zulip server hosts example.com, so that users don't need to fill that out in the login process.

For the open source release, we replaced this with in an explicit "what server are you doing prompt" but it would certainly be technically possible to go this route.

  • sinak  11 years ago

    Hey tabbott, I'd love to chat about this more if you're interested, it's something we've been particularly looking for. My email is sina@eff.org.

    White-label builds of Zulip apps would work, but at least in our case wouldn't be ideal. Having a central community-hosted service would be much better.