How to support push notification for iOS7 and iOS8?

iOS8 interactive notification

The whole concept is to quickly respond to a notification without context switch. iOS8 interactive notification also called actionable notification allows you to respond to messages, reminders and invites without having to leave your app or unlock your phone.

Deprecated API

Since iO8, registerForRemoteNotificationTypes has been deprecated in favour of registerUserNotificationSettings: with registerForRemoteNotifications. The API unifies notification settings whether it's a remote or user notification.

What about if...

You want to register for remote notification and you ...
use Xcode5 with iOS7

    [[UIApplication sharedApplication] registerForRemoteNotificationTypes: (UIRemoteNotificationTypeBadge | UIRemoteNotificationTypeSound | UIRemoteNotificationTypeAlert)];

use Xcode6 with iOS8

    UIUserNotificationSettings* notificationSettings = [UIUserNotificationSettings settingsForTypes:UIUserNotificationTypeAlert | UIUserNotificationTypeBadge | UIUserNotificationTypeSound categories:nil];
    [[UIApplication sharedApplication] registerUserNotificationSettings:notificationSettings];
    [[UIApplication sharedApplication] registerForRemoteNotifications];

use Xcode6 with iOS7

    [[UIApplication sharedApplication] registerForRemoteNotificationTypes: (UIRemoteNotificationTypeBadge | UIRemoteNotificationTypeSound | UIRemoteNotificationTypeAlert)];

use Xcode6 with iOS7 or iOS8
Testing wether or not the registerUserNotificationSettings: API is available at runtime, means you're running on iOS8.

    if ([application respondsToSelector:@selector(registerUserNotificationSettings:)]) {
        UIUserNotificationSettings* notificationSettings = [UIUserNotificationSettings settingsForTypes:UIUserNotificationTypeAlert | UIUserNotificationTypeBadge | UIUserNotificationTypeSound categories:nil];
        [[UIApplication sharedApplication] registerUserNotificationSettings:notificationSettings];
        [[UIApplication sharedApplication] registerForRemoteNotifications];
    } else {
        [[UIApplication sharedApplication] registerForRemoteNotificationTypes: (UIRemoteNotificationTypeBadge | UIRemoteNotificationTypeSound | UIRemoteNotificationTypeAlert)];
    }

use (Xcode6 with iOS8 or iOS7) and (Xcode5 with iOS7)
The macro __IPHONE_OS_VERSION_MAX_ALLOWED conditionally compiles the code so that the new Xcode6 compiler won't complain about the deprecations and the XCode5 won't complain about nonexistent symbols. for Xcode6 running on iOS7 we use the trick explained in previous section.

#if __IPHONE_OS_VERSION_MAX_ALLOWED >= __IPHONE_8_0
    if ([application respondsToSelector:@selector(registerUserNotificationSettings:)]) {
        UIUserNotificationSettings* notificationSettings = [UIUserNotificationSettings settingsForTypes:UIUserNotificationTypeAlert | UIUserNotificationTypeBadge | UIUserNotificationTypeSound categories:nil];
        [[UIApplication sharedApplication] registerUserNotificationSettings:notificationSettings];
        [[UIApplication sharedApplication] registerForRemoteNotifications];
    } else {
        [[UIApplication sharedApplication] registerForRemoteNotificationTypes: (UIRemoteNotificationTypeBadge | UIRemoteNotificationTypeSound | UIRemoteNotificationTypeAlert)];
    }
#else
    [[UIApplication sharedApplication] registerForRemoteNotificationTypes: (UIRemoteNotificationTypeBadge | UIRemoteNotificationTypeSound | UIRemoteNotificationTypeAlert)];
#endif

Tweet