so, I’m back a little while later, and the app now shows unread message counters, not only incrementing while the app is open but also synchronising with the backend so that you can see how many messages have come in even when the app was closed.

this required me to set up a database in the backend for tracking sequential message counters for each channel that the client can then subtract from its own records, I learnt some database stuff and also some stuff about making bulk HTTP requests, since I didn’t want to make a request per channel