Be advised about the following terminology used on this page.

  • By Notifications, iOS notifications are meant. They appear on the Lock Screen and Notification Centre of your Apple device.
  • A CrewLink notification is a pending (waiting for confirmation) CrewLink roster change issued by the Airline.

Notifications are sent for:

  1. Pending CrewLink notifications
  2. CrewLink validity end date changes

Both actions above are called Server check. The Server check always does both actions together in that order, and in one go. It checks for any pending CrewLink notifications and for a CrewLink validity end date change.

When does a Server check trigger?

  1. Automatic : Rostoics uses the iOS background fetch (BF) framework, which is active when the App is in background (= App is still running but not in foreground). To avoid hammering the servers, Server checks are spaced by at least 15 minutes (as of this writing – hardcoded, might change in the future). This doesn’t mean that BF fires every 15 minutes. The spacing could be hours, depending on battery life, user’s habits regarding his device and/or this App, the time of the day, network quality, … Basically, BF is a blackbox. Apple doesn’t reveal details when exactly it triggers. BF tries to optimize in terms of battery life and users need/wish to have updated information available when requested (some kind of simple artificial intelligence).
  2. Manual – App suspended : Because of the somewhat random behavior of BF, a Server check also fires when the App is starting up from suspended mode (= when the App doesn’t run in background, = the App was suspended (e.g. by App Switcher)).
  3. Manual – App in foreground : On top, notifications can also be forced while the App is running in foreground by using the Pull-to-refresh feature from the Info Tab.

Info Tab shows details about the Server checks:
Last notif. check : when (date & time) the last Server check took place
CrewLink validity end date : last date roster can be downloaded

Badge icons are used to show the user on the Home screen if there are any notifications. 1 can either be a pending CrewLink notification or a change in CrewLink validity end date. Check the Notification Centre which one fired. 2 means both were triggered. They appear the as grouped notifications in the Notification Centre.

When are badge icons reset?

  1. Pending Crewlink notifications:
    • when confirmed
    • anytime automatic or manual Server checks don’t find a pending CrewLink notification (anymore)
    • when Reset settings (Settings Tab) is used
  2. CrewLink validity end date changes:
    • after a successful download of a roster, using the CrewLink validity End date is used as End date