ha-ios-push-live-activities

Development

Live Activities and push notifications across the local-push and remote-push delivery flows. Use when implementing or fixing notifications, Live Activities, payload parsing/promotion, alerting behavior, or the SharedPush parser (including the vendored relay copy).

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Live Activities & Push Notifications

When implementing or fixing anything related to Live Activities (or push notifications generally), always check BOTH delivery flows — local push and remote push. They are handled by different code paths, so a field, behavior, or fix applied to one is easily missed in the other (e.g. a payload key parsed for APNs but dropped over local push, or alerting/sound handled differently per flow).

Remote push (APNs / cloud): Home Assistant → the push relay (Sources/PushServer) → APNs → the app / Sources/Extensions/NotificationService. The payload already carries a homeassistant dictionary.
Local push (WebSocket / NEAppPushProvider): delivered over the on-network channel and handled by Sources/Extensions/PushProvider + Sources/Shared/Notifications/LocalPush (LocalPushManager, LocalPushEvent). The payload arrives as a flat {message, data} shape and is reshaped by LegacyNotificationParserImpl (Sources/SharedPush/Sources/NotificationParserLegacy.swift), which must explicitly promote data fields into homeassistant — any field not in that promotion list is silently dropped on this flow only.

Both flows converge on NotificationCommandManager → HandlerStartOrUpdateLiveActivity → LiveActivityRegistry (Sources/Shared/LiveActivity), with the UI rendered by Sources/Extensions/Widgets/LiveActivity.

Practical checklist when changing this area:

If you add or read a notification/Live-Activity payload field, confirm it survives both the local-push parser promotion list and the remote-push payload.
Verify alerting behavior (sound, haptics, banner suppression, the silent flag) on both flows — local push presents notifications through LocalPushManager, not the system directly.
Sources/SharedPush is vendored as a separate copy under Sources/PushServer/SharedPush (the relay). Keep the two parser copies in sync when a parsing change is relevant to both the app and the relay; some logic intentionally lives in only one copy (e.g. the Live Activity live_update promotion is app-only, since the relay/cloud path already carries a homeassistant dict). When you change one copy, decide explicitly whether the other needs the same change.
Add/extend tests for both flows (e.g. Tests/Shared/LocalPushManager.test.swift for the local path, Sources/PushServer/Tests/SharedPushTests for the relay/parser).