Push notifications: setting up and fixing them
How members and trainers turn notifications on, what gets pushed, and what to try when they stop arriving properly.
Both the client app and the PT app can send notifications to a phone, so a message or an announcement shows up even with the app closed.
Turning them on
A banner appears in the app asking to enable notifications. The person has to tap it themselves — that's not an oversight, it's a requirement. Mobile browsers ignore a permission request that doesn't come from a real tap, and a request made any other way silently fails without granting anything.
So if someone says they never got asked: the banner is the only route. If they dismissed it, that's remembered, and they'll need to re-enable notifications through their browser or phone settings for the site.
What gets pushed
- A new PT message — to whichever side didn't send it.
- An announcement — to everyone it's addressed to, except the sender.
Tapping a notification opens the thing it's about: a message opens that conversation, an announcement opens the announcements list.
Notifications aren't required
Everything works without them. Messages and announcements still arrive in the app; the person just has to open it to see them. Unread counts badge the Messages tab regardless.
When they don't arrive
Work through these in order.
1. Is the app installed, or just open in a browser tab?
Notifications are far more reliable from an installed app. See A tour of the client app for installing — note that on iPhone it has to be Safari; Chrome and Firefox on iOS have no install path at all.
2. Did they actually grant permission?
Check the site's notification permission in the phone's browser settings. A dismissed or blocked prompt is the most common cause by far.
3. Is the phone silencing them?
Focus modes, Do Not Disturb and per-app notification settings all sit outside TelosGym.
The "New message" with no detail
There's one specific failure worth knowing, because it looks like a TelosGym bug and isn't fixable from your end.
Symptom: every notification arrives as a generic "New message" with no title and no body, on one particular phone, while other devices are fine.
Cause: that phone's browser is holding on to an old, superseded version of the background worker that handles notifications. It never gets replaced by a normal update, so the phone keeps using stale code indefinitely.
Fix: on the affected phone —
- Uninstall the app from the home screen first. This step is essential. An installed web app's data is protected, and clearing site data while it's still installed silently does nothing at all.
- Clear the site's data in the browser.
- Reinstall the app and log back in.
Only devices that set notifications up during a narrow window in August 2026 are affected. A phone that's working now won't develop this.
💡 If a member reports this, the uninstall-first order is the whole trick. Clearing data with the app still installed is what makes people conclude the fix "didn't work".
Checking what a device is doing
There's a support page at /debug-push.html on both apps. It shows the device's registrations and asks the background worker to identify itself. No reply from the worker means it's the stale-version problem above.
It's a permanent diagnostic tool, so it's safe to point someone at.