Notifications are received, but after significant delay
During normal operation, your devices will receive Pushover notifications within a second or so, often within a few hundred milliseconds. If your notifications take a long time to receive (more than 10 seconds), here are some things to check:
Pushover Network Issues
Pushover has a network status page where we list any issues with our service. If we are having delays sending out notifications, or if Apple's or Google's notification servers are having problems, we will update our network status page.
E-Mail Gateway Delays
Our E-Mail Gateway receives e-mails and turns them into Pushover notifications, but we can only do this once we actually receive the e-mail. E-mail is a fairly slow delivery mechanism and often has to relay through several servers before reaching our gateway. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do to speed up delivery of e-mails that have not yet reached our servers.
If you are seeing delays receiving Pushover notifications from e-mails, try sending directly to your devices through your dashboard. If notifications are received right away, the delay is most likely the e-mail server you are sending through.
Android Delays
Many Android vendors tweak their version of Android to aggressively kill background services to conserve battery power. One of these background services is often Google Play Services, which Pushover (and most other Android apps) rely on to receive push notifications.
Some also have issues with certain Wi-Fi networks where the device goes into a deep sleep (again to conserve battery power) but it does not wake up quickly to receive Wi-Fi traffic such as a pending push notification. The device wakes up every 30 or 60 seconds or so, and only then is the pending push notification received.
To troubleshoot this problem, try having your device unlocked with the Pushover app open on screen, and then send a message from your dashboard. If the message is received right away with the screen on, but after significant delay with the screen off, it is likely one of these power saving measures.
Additionally, you can try this with the device's Wi-Fi disabled, forcing your device to its mobile connectivity. If messages are received right away when not using Wi-Fi, it may be a Wi-Fi power saving issue or possibly a network issue with your Wi-Fi.
To disable these overly-aggressive power saving measures, we recommend the site Don't Kill My App for vendor-specific instructions, or you can contact your Android vendor for further help.
Since these issues are with your specific device or its version of Android, we cannot help resolve these issues. Our app can't do anything to display push notifications if the notifications are not reaching your device.
Advanced: IPv6 Issues
For users sending Pushover notifications from their own servers, one issue we occasionally see is a broken IPv6 configuration. Pushover's API (api.pushover.net) is reachable by IPv4 and IPv6, but if your server's IPv6 connectivity is not working properly, it will attempt to connect over IPv6 first, wait for the connection to timeout, and then fallback to an IPv4 connection which works right away. This results in delays of 30-60 seconds each time a message is sent to our API, but the delays is happening before our API even receives the message.
To diagnose this problem, try forcing your application/HTTP library to IPv4 connectivity, or disable IPv6 on your server completely.
