1. Does the "important" description for silent notification in the documentation still valid? (Pushing background updates to your App) The system treats background notifications as low priority: you can use them to refresh your app’s content, but the system doesn’t guarantee their delivery. In addition, the system may throttle the delivery of background notifications if the total number becomes excessive. The number of background notifications allowed by the system depends on current conditions, but don’t try to send more than two or three per hour. I would like to implement notification that would wake up my application in all state to perform AVSpeechSynthesizer, but I am confused with the availability of the silent notification. I attempted to send silent notification to my ipad to see the exact behaviour, but it seems like it has not been throttle even after a few tens attempts within the same hour. { "aps": { "content-available": 1, "alert": { "title": "Title", "body": "Content"}, "sound": "default" } } 2. I am also confused if mixing the "content-available" key pair with "alert" in the aps payload will make the Heads-up Notification been throttle as well?

Is there a way to configure the APNS notification sound volume to be louder? I am implementing some custom sounds(narrative sentences) for APNS, it does play the custom sound, but the volume of the custom sound is not loud enough even though I had set the device's volume and "RingTone and Alerts" volume to max. I tried to amplify the custom sound file, it does play louder but the result is minimum if I want to maintain the quality of the sound without it been distorted. I tried to use Notification Service Extension, AVAudioPlayer and AVAudioSession to play the sound, it does play louder in max volume compare with relying on default sound payload in APNS, but the problem is AVAudioPlayer and AVAudioSession do not seems to be usable when the application is in background or killed state, is there any other alternative I could use?