[Android] Clear notifications when messages are read on desktop/web

[lukasIO]

When I have my phone enabled to receive push notifications even if online, I receive the notifications without a problem, my issue is, that they stay on the lockscreen even if I read them on the desktop app. Other messenging apps somehow retroactively remove those push notifications once the corresponding message has been read on another app... Would this be feasible for the zulip-way of doing it?

[gnprice]

Thanks @lukasIO for bringing this up!

I definitely agree it would be good to do this, and I don't think there's any fundamental reason it'd be harder for us than for other chat apps -- we just haven't implemented it yet. The server side of our push notifications is currently pretty fire-and-forget.

I think the main work to do this will be the machinery on the Zulip server to track what messages have caused push notifications, and which of those are still unread. This is basically the same as the backend we'll need for maintaining a badge count, or dot, on the home screen, which is another feature many people want. Some design discussion on that is in zulip/zulip#7459 .

[zulipbot]

Hello @zulip/server-notifications members, this issue was labeled with the "area: notifications" label, so you may want to check it out!

[lukasIO]

Just as a feedback about this issue: in our evaluating process of zulip basically everyone in the team complained about this...

[gnprice]

Update on this:

• The necessary machinery on the server is done! This was Send GCM message to mobile app for removing message from notification if read on server zulip#10094 , and see design discussion in Fix home screen notification unread counts in the mobile apps zulip#7459 .
  • The machinery is present in the 1.9 release, complete with code to notify the Android app (via GCM) when a message that caused a notification is read; but we kept that code disabled for 1.9, because the Android app prior to 16.2.96 (released 2018-08-22) was not future-proofed for new features and would respond badly to such a GCM message.
• I've just merged an implementation for Android! See a09ddea . This is slated for the next mobile release.

Still to be done:

• We need to start having production servers send these "that message was read, clear the notification" updates for Android clients. We need to handle the issue that old versions of the app respond badly to them, but we have a couple of options for that.

• We need to implement this for iOS. I'm actually going to split this issue in two, because there are a couple of pieces to be done for that.

[gnprice]

With zulip/zulip#11542, this is done!

[timabbott]

I think you got the issue number wrong :)