Notification banner appearing for every chat in an Android app when just one chat has received a new message

Bug Reports
#1

REPRODUCIBILITY: 100%
OS VERSION: 4.4.0.72
HARDWARE: Sony Xperia 10 II
UI LANGUAGE: fr-FR
REGRESSION: no

DESCRIPTION:

Android instant messenger (IM) apps seem to generate too much notifications for chats. Let’s say you already have notifications in the event screen for new messages in the group chats named A, B and C in the Element IM app. You receive a new message in group chat A. Now Sailfish OS will display a banner for group chat A, B and C.

The current behaviour is a slight annoyance because you know that someone has messaged you, but you’ll either have to wait until the relevant chat notification shows up or you’ll have to swipe the non-relevant chat notifications away.

I’ve seen this with happening at least the following IM apps: Element, Telegram, Whatsapp.

PRECONDITIONS:

Have notifications for several chats in a single IM app on the events screen.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE:

  1. Have someone send you a message in the same IM app as told above, so you get a new notification.

EXPECTED RESULT:

Only a notification banner for the person who messaged you appears on top of the screen. This is what would happen in Android.

ACTUAL RESULT:

A notification banner for each chat with a notification in the events screen for said IM app appears and a new one.

MODIFICATIONS:

None

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

2 Likes
Community meeting on IRC 24th November 2022
#2

With some android messaging apps such as Threema or Signal there was an option to adapt notification settings in Android settings dialogue of that app. Go to SFOS Settings - Select ‘Apps’ tab - find and select your app - press “Open Android settings” - open ‘Notifications’ and adapt your selection.

#3

This is the same notification bug as the one reported by me concerning Android’s download manager.notifications.

The root cause is that after an Android notification is displayed, its status doesn’t change to “read” or something like that, it is still considered as “new” and is placed in a kind of queue. When there’s another Android notification, all notifications from this queue are shown one by one. It takes tapping a notification to dismiss it, or else it remains in such a queue and is re-displayed eternally.

This bug is not unique/specific to just Android messaging apps, it affects all kinds of Android notifications. In my case it affects Android’s download manager and causes that until I manually tap each notification about a successful download, all the past notifications are re-shown on every new file download.

2 Likes
#4

Ah, I wasn’t aware of that. I tried searching for similair issues but couldn’t find it. I mostly noticed the issue with IM apps, because that’s basically my main usage of the Android app support.

So if any of the bug tracking teams notice it, you can mark it as duplicate :slight_smile:

1 Like
#5

Well, it’s good that you reported it. The more reports, the higher chance that one day it gets noticed and fixed. While maybe this bug is not harmful, it is really annoying. As I wrote, in my case it takes tapping each new notification as it appears for the first time to prevent it from being re-displayed over and over again. But tapping it causes that the downloaded file (e.g. an image) gets opened in an associated program (or the list of apps to choose from is shown), which then needs to be dismissed, too. Time consuming and very irritating.

1 Like
#6

I’ll close this now so that further conversation happens on @wetab73’s earlier report, but to echo what @wetab73 already wrote, it’s appreciated that you reported this @ahappyhuman.

1 Like
#7