Sorry for the confusion. This comment is inaccurate. For notifs that don't have body in payload (rescinds and badgeonly) we costruct new notif locally in this code but we pass it to contentHandler so it is not a local notif but a remote notif. I will delete this comment.

I'm still confused here, to be honest. If we construct the new notif locally, how is it a remote notif and not a local notif?

Even though it is an object instantiated in the NSE code we pass it to contentHandler given to the NSE byt the OS so the OS treats it as a remote notif.

Okay, I think I was using the terms wrong. Let me ask my question again.

Why would a new remote badge-only notif need to be created, as opposed to modifying the remote notif we receive?

Initially badge only notif/rescind has body set to "ENCRYPTED". I recall that when I was introducing this code I tried first to modify body of received object directly and I found that:

• setting body to empty string results in empty notif
• setting body to nil results in bad memory access crash

However creating new notif object without touching its body property worked as desired. Signal does it too: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/blob/main/SignalNSE/NotificationService.swift#L80-L83.

I guess that Apple initially sets this field to some flag that prevents system from displaying any visual content.

setting body to empty string results in empty notif

Isn't that what we want, though? An empty notif that only updates badge count?

I meant visible empty notif bubble.

Okay, got it. It took a lot of clarification but I think I understand now. Next time hopefully there can be less confusion if we use less ambiguous language