Local Notifications Vs Push Notifications

Answer 1

Many people enjoy waking up to the sound of their phone buzzing with a notification. However, that may be irrelevant if it’s an annoying app message or an unwelcome text from a friend. Although it might seem like push notifications are more useful than local notifications, in reality, they can be equally as frustrating and less personal. Local notifications are a small window that appears on your phone to show information from your home screen. Push notifications, on the other hand, are an alert sent to a user's device when they have been inactive for a certain amount of time.

Answer 2

It mainly depends on; is the data coming from local or remote?

You cannot control when your users open the app, and only when they open the app (with a few exceptions) you are able to fetch data. Then with that data you would be able to schedule a local notification. But in most cases that doesn't make much sense, because they have already loaded and probably seen the data. It only makes sense when you schedule an alarm clock for instance.

When you want the data to come from remote, like when they receive a message, you will have to use push notifications. The user is then alerted that new data is available without having to go look for it themselves. It is pushed to them.

However, for push notifications you will need infrastructure which you did not when using local notifications. You will need a server to handle the push notifications (Azure has some awesome functionalities for this) and some trigger to send push notifications. This can be an insert on a database, or a scheduled task. Also, the user has to enable push notifications and your app has to register itself to be able to receive them. It can be a pain to implement it the first time.