Provisional notifications is a feature, release by Apple, intended as a way to help users deal with the deluge of notifications they receive on a daily basis.

With provisional push enabled, users won’t be asked to opt in or out of notifications for your app, they’ll automatically be opted in. However, these notifications will all be delivered “quietly”, meaning they won’t trigger a banner or sound and won’t appear on the lock screen, instead they’ll go straight to the Notification Centre.

Also note that any existing users who’ve opted in to your notifications won’t be affected by an update with provisional notifications switched on, they’ll continue to receive them in the same way they always have. Additionally, users who are receiving your pushes quietly are able to change them to be received prominently in the same way. 

iOS now allows users to turn off all notifications from an app, or set them to be delivered quietly, directly from a notification, and Siri will suggest doing so for apps whose notifications you rarely interact with. These tools are explicitly focused on reducing the number of pushes users receive every day. Provisional push not only exposes more users to your notifications, but also greatly reduces the chance of them falling victim to the above tools. Additionally, users who are receiving your pushes quietly are able to choose to receive them prominently both from the system settings and from the notification itself.

The default behaviour in Bolt is for provisional push to be turned off, so users will be asked to opt in or out. If you'd like your app to use provisional push then let us know and we can change it for you.