What is the best way to handle push notifications? Should they basically be treated as more of an alert for your app to then pull down info from a server, or should you effectively use the actual message that is sent in the Notification to perform what you want to achieve?
How does an app like whatsapp work? Is the notification just a summary of the message and the app pulls the full message down from the server?
It should be treated as an alert. Once your app starts it should pull the data from your server.
Push notifications might not arrive at all. For example if the user kills your app with a swipe then push messages will not arrive until the app is started again.