I am creating an application which has a follow mechanism where the followed user has to accept the request of a following (similar to private accounts on instagram).
I then want the following user to find out when the other user has checked a million times (every time the following user opens the screen if I did the query in viewDidLoad). However, the problem with this, is that there will be a lot requests which will expensive to me as I will have to pay for the requests to Parse so I want to minimise these queries.
Currently, the best thing I can think of is to check once a day at midnight for example but this doesn't seem very seamless.
Is there a better way of doing this?
For starters consider how stale you are willing to allow an app's view of the world to be and cache the response that long. If a user views that screen every 30 seconds you might only want to actually check with the server 5 minutes after the last successful response (or the last response which had 0 follow requests).
You might consider switching from this sort of "pull" polling where the client decides when to ask the server if anything has changed to a "push" model where the server can inform the client when a change occurs. For example you can send a silent background push notification to a user's devices when they have a follow request, the app can then respond by performing your existing query.
You might still want polling or user triggered requests (like a "pull to refresh" gesture) as a fallback for missed notifications or devices with notifications disabled but you should be able to drastically reduce request volume.