Is it possible to receive a Push Notification when other players are nearby?

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Hi there, first post here (very impressed with what I’ve discovered so far with Corona!):

I’ve been tasked to build a simple iOS/Android game with multiplayer over WiFi or bluetooth — my client has asked me if it’s possible to receive push notifications when other players with the app are nearby even when the app is not running. 

Is this even possible? I know that with Pokémon Go, notifications are received when Pokémon are nearby, but I’m guessing that is data being sent by a master server (and works different in principle than what my client has in mind). 

I feel like it’s probably not possible to receive notifications in the wild unless both users have the app running; but I thought I would ask here to make sure!

#2

This might be a little tricky with Corona because we technically don’t support background processing. Games like Pokémon Go, can send GPS data to the server from the background. You might get it to work on iOS.

Still the server sends the push notification.

Rob

#3

Thanks for your reply; I think you’re right in that there would be no way to do this without a server involved (even if two phones “in the wild” could connect to each other with bluetooth, there would be no way to pass data unless the phones were paired in the first place, which would be necessary to setup the notification). 

I think that trying to set this up will be needlessly complicated and I should explain to my client that we should focus on local WiFi/Bluetooth multiplayer. 

#4

This might be a little tricky with Corona because we technically don’t support background processing. Games like Pokémon Go, can send GPS data to the server from the background. You might get it to work on iOS.

Still the server sends the push notification.

Rob

#5

Thanks for your reply; I think you’re right in that there would be no way to do this without a server involved (even if two phones “in the wild” could connect to each other with bluetooth, there would be no way to pass data unless the phones were paired in the first place, which would be necessary to setup the notification). 

I think that trying to set this up will be needlessly complicated and I should explain to my client that we should focus on local WiFi/Bluetooth multiplayer.