Pulse

Docs

Pulse is developer-friendly push notifications. Send a notification to your iPhone from any script with curl. A topic you create becomes a channel. Messages stay in the feed, and, once you allow notifications, they can also arrive as a system alert.

The hosted service is api.pulsenotifications.app. The app can also point at a server you run. Publishing has to go to the server the app is signed in to.

Signing in

Create an account with email and password, or use Sign in with Apple on iPhone when that server offers it. Sign in with Google is shown only when Google client ids are set. If the server requires verification, enter the code from the email. “Email me a code” on the sign-in screen is another way in.

The session stays on the device. Signing out ends it. Saving a different server in Settings signs you out. The next sign-in uses an account on that server. The hosted session does not carry over.

Topics and channels

On Channels, tap New subscription. The sheet is titled New Subscription. Enter a topic name, such as backups, and tap Subscribe. A name is lower-cased. It can contain letters, numbers, -, and _, up to 64 characters.

Pulse creates that topic for your account and subscribes this device. The topic name is the channel. Messages published to it show on that channel and in the feed. A publish secret is stored as a hash on the server. On the phone, the secret is saved in the keychain. The integration snippet keeps it masked until you tap Show secret.

A browser does not register a push device. Messages there stay in the app.

Publishing with curl

Open the channel and tap the integration control, or long-press the channel row. Copy includes the publish secret in an X-Pulse-Token header. The snippet on screen stays masked until you tap Show secret. POST and PUT both publish. The path is the topic name.

The command has this shape. YOUR_TOPIC_TOKEN stands in for the secret the app copied. It is not a working token. 

curl \
  -H "X-Pulse-Token: YOUR_TOPIC_TOKEN" \
  -d "Backup finished" \
  https://api.pulsenotifications.app/backups

A plain-text body is the message. A JSON body can set message (or body), plus an optional title, priority (min, low, default, high, or urgent), tags, a click URL, and actions. The message needs a title or a message. A wrong or replaced secret is rejected, and the message is not stored.

Replacing the secret makes the previous value stop working. Open the channel’s integration snippet. If this device does not already have a secret stored and your account owns the channel, tap Generate new secret and confirm it. Then copy the new snippet. If the device already has the secret, that screen shows the current snippet.

Quiet hours

Quiet hours are stored on this device. They are not part of the account, and they stay after you sign out. The control is in Settings. It is off until you turn it on. The starting window is 22:00 to 07:00, and you can change both times. Times follow this device.

While quiet hours are on, Pulse does not play an alert sound or show a banner, including for a muted channel. Notifications still arrive in the feed.

Notification settings

Messages for a channel you follow always show in that channel and in the feed. Mute and quiet hours do not remove them. System alerts are a separate control, in Settings under Notifications.

Swipe a channel and tap Mute. Mute is saved on this device. While Pulse is open, a muted channel does not play an alert sound or show a banner. The message still arrives in the feed, and its unread count is left out of the total. Unmute restores the alert for that channel. The server skips a push only when that device’s subscription is marked muted. The Mute control in the app does not send that flag, so a system alert can still arrive when Pulse is not in the foreground.

Clearing history

The feed and each channel show messages for the channels you follow, newest first. The phone keeps at most 100 of those messages in its cache for the signed-in account and the server you are using. Older cached rows drop off the device as new ones arrive. That cap does not delete them on the server.

To clear one channel, swipe it and tap Unsubscribe. That removes the channel from this device and drops its cached messages. If your account owns the topic, Pulse also deletes the topic on the server, including its messages and delivery records. A topic you do not own stays, including the hosted announcements topic.

The app has no control that clears the whole feed while leaving your channels in place, and it does not ask for an “older than” date. Messages on the server stay until the topic is removed. Someone operating the server can delete notifications older than a chosen number of days. When that command is run without a number, the window is 30 days. The application does not run the command by itself.

Deleting the account removes topics that account owns, and the messages on them. The steps are in the Privacy Policy.

FAQ

I’m not receiving notifications

Which header carries the token?

X-Pulse-Token. The value is the topic’s publish secret, not your account session. The account session uses Authorization and is not a publish credential.

Do channel messages stay on if I turn alerts off?

Yes. The feed and the channel keep the messages. Enable notifications only controls the system alert. Quiet hours and Mute change the alert on this device. They do not remove the message from the feed.

Can I clear one channel without deleting it?

No. Unsubscribe is the control that drops a channel’s cached messages, and for a topic you own it also deletes the topic on the server. There is no separate “clear history” action that keeps the channel.

Using a server you run

In Settings, open Server and save an https:// address, or an http:// address on your local network. Saving a different server signs you out. That server has its own accounts and its own database. The Privacy Policy describes the Pulse app and the hosted service.

Contact

Email support@pulsenotifications.app. Shorter answers are on the Support page.