Apple stops legacy binary protocol based notifications
Kapil Powar, Vivin Krishnan March 29, 2021
MobileFirst_Platform MobileFirst_Foundation_push iOS
APNS has announced that they will no longer support legacy binary protocol from March 31, 2021. Users have been asked to switch to the new HTTP/2 protocol to avoid disruptions to Push notifications capability.
Starting from March 31st, APNS will close legacy binary protocol endpoints with port 2197 and 2195.
Apple Push Notification service server certificate update
APNS made one more announcement regarding the server certificate update.
On March 29, 2021, Apple Push Notification service must incorporate the new root certificate (AAACertificateServices 5/12/2020) which replaces the old GeoTrust Global CA root certificate. To ensure a seamless transition and to avoid push notification delivery failures, verify that both the old and new root certificates for the HTTP/2 interface are included in the Trust Store of each of your notification servers before March 29th.
Note that Apple Push Notification service SSL provider certificates issued to you by Apple need not be to updated at this time.
Enabling HTTP/2 notifications
MobileFirst Platform fully supports HTTP/2 protocol based APNs notifications.
For Liberty starting with iFix 8.0.0.0-MFPF-IF201812191602-CDUpdate-04, and for WASND iFix 8.0.0.0-MFPF-IF202002111526 MobileFirst Platform supports HTTP/2 based notifications for Apple devices.
For more information on proxy setup, see HTTP/2 APNs Push Notifications using Apache HTTP Server as Proxy.
Benefits of HTTP/2 based notifications
The HTTP/2-based Apple Push Notification service (APNs) provider API lets you take advantage of its features, such as authentication with a JSON Web Token, improved error messaging, and per-notification feedback.
New endpoints for APNS service
To use APNS service, the following new endpoints are needed:
Development server: api.sandbox.push.apple.com:443
Production server: api.push.apple.com:443
Inclusive terminology note: The Mobile First Platform team is making changes to support the IBM® initiative to replace racially biased and other discriminatory language in our code and content with more inclusive language. While IBM values the use of inclusive language, terms that are outside of IBM's direct influence are sometimes required for the sake of maintaining user understanding. As other industry leaders join IBM in embracing the use of inclusive language, IBM will continue to update the documentation to reflect those changes.