This is such an important feature to me, as a person who really likes to engage in back and forth comment conversations, timely responses are immensely helpful, and only feasible with notifications.
I’m aware there are on going costs, personally I’m happy to pay a couple of bucks a month for push notifications alone. More if other features are also included.
Yes, push notifications on iOS require a server running to monitor and send notifications to the device through Apples servers. During TestFlight with a small user base, I can offer this for free as the server cost would be negligible. Once I release to the AppStore, and the user base increases, the server cost will grow and I’ll need to use a subscription modal to cover server costs.
That said, apple doesn’t allow for charging for notification service, so the subscription would need to bundle notifications with other premium features to allow charging for the service. I never planned on charging for any premium service for Arctic, so I need to come up with a modal for this.
Ideally I’d like to keep Arctic completely free, but that is likely not realistic long term.
I would happily pay for premium features including notifications.
I was just curious how Lemmios was the first app that offered realtime notifications since basically day 1, that’s why I linked it.
That took a little longer than expected, but I finally got push notifications working. They can be enabled on a per-account basis.
As of right now, I’m planning to support basic notifications as a free feature in Arctic, and I may just bundle more advanced notifications in a premium package such as community watchers, moderator notifications, and scheduled posts.
I still have a little work to do on this update, but I should be able to release this in the next couple of days.
Great to hear, I’m still working out the payment model for this. I don’t want to paywall core features so I’m still considering what features to bundle for premium.
The Lemmios dev was definitely quick to add notifications. I don’t have much free time to work on Arctic lately, so I’ve been focusing on core functions mainly. I did however have the last 2 days to work on this, and I managed to get the notification server API written, now I just need setup the domain, and deploy it. So we should have notifications in the next release assuming all goes well.
I also added an Open in Arctic safari extension, so you can open Lemmy links directly from safari.