Add UI for controlling more settings

[gnprice]

Zulip has a very large number of settings that a user can change, and even more that an org admin can change. The mobile apps (both the legacy zulip-mobile app, and this new app) provide UI for controlling only a small number of these settings.

Most users will never touch most of the settings; most of those they do, they'll touch just once, setting to their preferred values, and never touch again. When a user does want to change a setting that's not in the mobile app, they can always resort to the web app — even if their phone is the only device at hand, they can use their phone's browser. So the bulk of the settings are of low value to implement; and it'd be a lot of work to implement all of them, so we won't be setting out to do that comprehensively in the near or medium term.

Some settings come up more often, though. Any setting that it seems like a large swath of users will want to change, or some users will want to frequently change, is one we should consider implementing.

This is an umbrella issue for us to collect feedback on settings that users would like to see implemented. We'll file individual issues for specific settings when we decide to actually implement them.

Related issues

• See the other issues with the "a-settings" label.

[gnprice]

One piece of feedback last week:

Are there some settings in particular you find yourself regularly missing in the current [legacy] mobile app?

In particular, the detailed notification settings in Personal settings would be very useful to have, and also user group management. Most other settings I guess would just be nice to have, but I can't think of any others that are necessary to me.

The first part calls for going beyond

• Set basic server-side notification settings #661

to the finer-grained notification settings the web app offers controls for.

[alya]

I also wonder if we can offer an in-app link that takes you to the settings panel on mobile web?

[gnprice]

Hmm, interesting idea!

I think it would be easy to add a version of that which didn't do anything to log you in — so it would end up showing you web's login screen if you weren't already logged in in your browser. (Then once you did log in, it might take you to your home view instead of the settings screen, not sure; so you could either find the gear menu yourself, or go back to the app and follow the link again.)

That's probably enough to be useful, for the long tail of settings that you'd go months or years between wanting to change.

For any settings that a user wants to touch more often than that, the extra login would get annoying. We could build a way for the mobile app to make a link that includes an appropriate kind of token to log you right into the web app. Needs careful attention to security (among other things, we'd make the token expire on a very short lifetime like a minute), but I think totally doable. That could be a good O(1) solution for the otherwise O(number of settings) problem of building UI for all the settings.

I think even then, we'll still want the thing this issue thread is for: anything that lots of users will want to change, or some will want to frequently change, we'd build UI for directly in the app. I think that'll be a very small fraction of our total repertoire of settings.