Mobile notifications

Zulip Server 11.0+ supports end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for mobile push notifications. Mobile push notifications sent by all Zulip servers go through Zulip's mobile push notifications service, which then delivers the notifications through the appropriate platform-specific push notification service (Google's FCM or Apple's APNs). E2EE push notifications ensure that mobile notification message content and metadata is not visible to intermediaries.

Mobile clients that have registered an E2EE push device will receive mobile notifications end-to-end encrypted by their Zulip server.

This page documents the format of the encrypted JSON-format payloads that the client will receive through this protocol. The same encrypted payload formats are used for both Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) and Apple Push Notification service (APNs).

Payload examples

New channel message

Sample JSON data that gets encrypted:

{
  "channel_id": 10,
  "channel_name": "Denmark",
  "content": "@test_user_group",
  "mentioned_user_group_id": 41,
  "mentioned_user_group_name": "test_user_group",
  "message_id": 45,
  "realm_name": "Zulip Dev",
  "realm_url": "http://zulip.testserver",
  "recipient_type": "channel",
  "sender_avatar_url": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/818c212b9f8830dfef491b3f7da99a14?d=identicon&version=1",
  "sender_full_name": "aaron",
  "sender_id": 6,
  "time": 1754385395,
  "topic": "test",
  "type": "message",
  "user_id": 10
}

• The mentioned_user_group_id and mentioned_user_group_name fields are only present for messages that mention a group containing the current user, and triggered a mobile notification because of that group mention. For example, messages that mention both the user directly and a group containing the user, these fields will not be present in the payload, because the direct mention has precedence.

Changes: New in Zulip 11.0 (feature level 413).

New direct message

Sample JSON data that gets encrypted:

{
  "content": "test content",
  "message_id": 46,
  "pm_users": "6,10,12,15"
  "realm_name": "Zulip Dev",
  "realm_url": "http://zulip.testserver",
  "recipient_type": "direct",
  "sender_avatar_url": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/818c212b9f8830dfef491b3f7da99a14?d=identicon&version=1",
  "sender_full_name": "aaron",
  "sender_id": 6,
  "time": 1754385290,
  "type": "message",
  "user_id": 10
}

• Group direct messages: The pm_users string field is only present for group direct messages, containing a sorted comma-separated list of all user IDs in the group direct message conversation, including both user_id and sender_id.

Changes: New in Zulip 11.0 (feature level 413).

New group direct message

Remove notifications

When a batch of messages that had previously been included in mobile notifications are marked as read, are deleted, become inaccessible, or otherwise should no longer be displayed to the user, a removal notification is sent.

Sample JSON data that gets encrypted:

{
  "message_ids": [
    31,
    32
  ],
  "realm_name": "Zulip Dev",
  "realm_url": "http://zulip.testserver",
  "type": "remove",
  "user_id": 10
}

Changes: New in Zulip 11.0 (feature level 413).

Future work

This page will eventually also document the formats of the APNs and FCM payloads wrapping the encrypted content.