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Push Notifications and Background Work

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Problem

Explain how you would design push notification handling and background processing in a mobile app. Cover how the app receives a push, how it processes the payload in different app states, and how you would keep background work reliable without violating OS limits.

App States

  • Foreground: the app is active and can update UI immediately.
  • Background: the app may have limited execution time for short tasks.
  • Terminated: the app may only receive limited wake-up opportunities depending on platform rules.

Constraints

  • Background work must be short and battery-friendly.
  • Notification delivery is not guaranteed to be exactly once.
  • UI updates must happen on the main thread.
  • The design should tolerate retries, delays, and duplicate payloads.