I've noticed over the last couple months that the autofetch of messages is not working reliably. It is set to fetch automatically every hour, but I seldom get a notification for new messages.
Two days I got a notification and upon checking my inbox, I had a new/recent email but also several unread messages for many days ago (for which I did not get any notification).
Obviously, notification are fully enabled for the RadioMail app.
I have not tried to delete and re-install the app, in case this would make a difference and fix it.
Unfortunately background fetch has not been as reliable as I'd like. Mainly because how iOS controls the background process and terminates it for various reasons. It's been very frustrating to troubleshoot. However the notification should appear if new mail is received. Perhaps the phone was in do not disturb mode?
I've been thinking about ways to improve this feature by having server side events to trigger a fetch periodically but that would require a service to run and maintain.
It's going to require some significant investment to figure this out.
I’m having the same problem with RadioMail 1.5.0 (1) on iOS. When I open the app, it shows the last update, which is when I manually fetched messages. Autofetch was a key feature to be notified of new messages – I’m not a Windows user and don’t want to start up a VM to check Winlink on a regular basis. I’d appreciate this being resolved.
Jeremy, this has been an area of frustration for me too.
There have been small improvements in RadioMail 1.5 that should help with this issue. Previously, background fetch could stop under certain edge conditions.
To allow background fetches and notifications to work, iOS needs the app to stay running in the background. Make sure you don’t force quit RadioMail by swiping it away. If the app is fully closed, the system can’t wake it to do a fetch.
That said, Apple’s background fetch is limited and can be inconsistent. If the app hasn’t been opened in a while, or if the phone is low on battery, iOS may reduce or skip background activity.
A more reliable alternative would be server-side push. But that would require dedicated infrastructure, which is costly to operate, and to be effective, it would also need special integration hooks into the Winlink system, which don’t exist at this time.
At this point, I don’t expect autofetch to get much better than it is now.
Thanks for the response. Autofetches did happen sporadically today. As long as they succeed every few hours, that’s probably adequate for my needs. I understand that a server side push is a big infrastructure investment. I had hoped for the cost of the app that this would be working reliably, though get that you’re not operating at the scale of Google.