Skip to content
Zulip help center

Mobile notifications

Zulip can be configured to send mobile notifications for DMs, mentions, and alerts, as well as channel messages and followed topics.

  1. Go to Notifications.
  2. Toggle the checkboxes in the Mobile column of the Notification triggers table.

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) for mobile push notifications

Section titled “End-to-end encryption (E2EE) for mobile push notifications”

Zulip Server 12.0+ and Zulip Cloud support end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) mobile push notifications. All push notifications sent from an up-to-date version of the server to an updated version of the app (30.0.271+ on Android, 30.0.272+ on iOS) will be end-to-end encrypted. E2EE ensures that message content and metadata (including the sender’s and recipient’s names, or channel and topic where the message was sent) are not visible to Apple, Google, or Zulip’s Mobile Push Notification Service.

Organization administrators can require end-to-end encryption for mobile push notifications. When this setting is enabled, push notifications will only be sent to updated version of the apps that support end-to-end encryption. Older apps that don’t support E2EE will not receive any push notifications.

See technical documentation for encryption protocol details.

Require end-to-end encryption for mobile push notifications

Section titled “Require end-to-end encryption for mobile push notifications”
  1. Go to Organization settings.
  2. Under Notifications security, toggle Require end-to-end encryption for push notifications.

Mobile notifications while online

Section titled “Mobile notifications while online”

You can customize whether or not Zulip will send mobile push notifications while you are actively using one of the Zulip apps.

  1. Go to Notifications.
  2. Under Mobile message notifications, toggle Send mobile notifications even if I’m online, as desired.

Testing mobile notifications

Section titled “Testing mobile notifications”

Start by configuring your notifications settings to make it easy to trigger a notification.

  1. Go to Notifications.
  2. In the Mobile column of the Notification triggers table, make sure the DMs, mentions, and alerts checkbox is checked.
  3. Under Mobile message notifications, make sure the Send mobile notifications even if I’m online checkbox is checked.

Next, test Zulip push notifications on your mobile device.

  1. Download and install the Zulip mobile app if you have not done so already.
  2. If your Zulip organization is self-hosted (not at *.zulipchat.com), check whether push notifications have been set up. If they were set up recently, you will need to log out of your account.
  3. Log in to the account you want to test.
  4. Ask another user (not yourself) to send you a direct message. You should see a Zulip message notification in the notifications area on your device.

Troubleshooting mobile notifications

Section titled “Troubleshooting mobile notifications”

Checking your device settings

Section titled “Checking your device settings”

Some Android vendors have added extra device-level settings that can impact the delivery of mobile notifications to apps like Zulip. If you’re having issues with Zulip notifications on your Android phone, we recommend Signal’s excellent troubleshooting guide, which explains the notification settings for many popular Android vendors.

Android users using microG: we have heard reports of notifications working if microG’s “Cloud Messaging” setting is enabled.

Enabling push notifications for self-hosted servers

Section titled “Enabling push notifications for self-hosted servers”

To enable push notifications for your organization:

  1. Your server administrator needs to register your Zulip server with the Zulip Mobile Push Notification Service.
  2. For organizations with more than 10 users, a user who can manage plans and billing needs to sign up for a plan for your organization.
Section titled “Related articles”