Notifications overview

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Notifications reliability

• https://github.com/nextcloud/talk-desktop/issues/378
• https://github.com/nextcloud/talk-desktop/issues/699

Notifications are sometimes not reliable. Especially when an app is not used, notifications can be delayed and then many notifications shown simultaneously.

1. Improve notifications logging
2. Hypothesis 1 - Chromium suspends WS connection (most likely)
   • In this case we should move notifications handling to the main process in Talk Desktop
     • Make notify_push frontend environment independent
   • Alternative - Web Push API
3. Hypothesis 2 - There is a problem with notify_push frontend
4. Hypothesis 3 - There is a problem with notify_push backend

Notifications implementations

• https://github.com/nextcloud/talk-desktop/issues/1151

Currently Talk Desktop stores a copy of notifications app source code. This results in handling issues in 2 places.

1. In the notifications app separate:
   • Notifications core (UI, web-browser, and Vue independent)
   • Talk related notifications handling
   • Frontend
2. In the notifications app provide all above as a library and publish to npm
3. Reuse in Talk Desktop

Notifications visibility

• https://github.com/nextcloud/talk-desktop/issues/391
• https://github.com/nextcloud/talk-desktop/issues/85

Currently notifications are only visible in the notifications center on the system level.

1. Add Talk frontend API to get the number of unread messages as well as subscribe to an update
2. Use this API to show the number in the badge
3. Add UI to see the list of notifications

Other improvements

• Update existing notification when possible:
  • Update notification text on the message edit
  • Remove notification when the message has been deleted
  • Replace "Incoming call" notification with "Missed call"
• Make sure information from notifications, conversations list, and conversation are inline

Review linked issues 378, 699, 1151, 391, and 85, then inspect the notifications app copy used by Talk Desktop. Trace notify_push and the frontend notification handling, including the proposed main-process path; done would require an agreed subset of the reliability, reuse, visibility, and notification-update improvements.