Why am I not receiving notifications?
Our engineering team have tested the notification functionality on various mobile devices, and it seems that what you are experiencing may be related to the mobile phone functionality and not the Unibuddy app itself.
Whenever a user implements a "force-shut" of an application on an iPhone or Android device, the user will not receive notifications. This is by design from the OS developers, because it would pose security issues to be receiving correspondence from an app that you thought was not running.
Example: Attempt to force-shut your Whatsapp, and then get someone to send you a message. You will notice that you won't get notified.
How the app is force-shut could happen in a variety of ways, but this is unrelated to the Unibuddy app itself. Some older phone models may stop the app completely whenever you "close or open apps."
Another way this could happen is if you may have turned off your phone or the battery charge runs out. If you don’t reopen the app after turning on the phone again, the Unibuddy app is unable to get permission to show our push notifications.
What can I do to ensure I receive notifications?
1. Check you have a strong mobile network connection.
2. Ensure you have the latest version of the app downloaded.
A trouble-shooting measure you could take would be deleting the Unibuddy app from your device entirely, perform a hard restart of your device, then re-downloading the app from the Android/iOS App Store.
3. Unibuddy app sessions expire every 30 days. Therefore you would need to remember to log in within that time frame to ensure you receive these notifications.
4. Additionally, Badge notifications on a mobiles device's Settings need to be set to ON.
If this issue persists, a good workaround measure would be enabling SMS message notifications to ensure you are notified of incoming messages via Unibuddy.
SMS does not rely on the app being open or not, they will still notify the user even if the app is force-shut.
To do this, navigate/login to your Ambassador Dashboard on your desktop/laptop and select your image on the bottom left side of the screen. From there, select the Settings option. From this prompt, you will be able to select SMS as your notification preference:
⚠️ If a Student or Staff Ambassador is deactivated, all notifications are suppressed.