nikclayton

Tusky v22 changes how Android notifications are displayed.

To understand why the behaviour is the way it is it helps to know a little bit about how Android allows apps to send notifications. Strap in, this gets a little long.

Tusky notifications are sent to Android notification “channels”. Tusky creates one channel for each type of Mastodon notification you can get (boosts, favourites, mentions, etc).

Each channel is associated with a Tusky account, so if you're logged in with two accounts you'll have two channels for boosts (one per account), two channels for mentions, etc.

You can see all of this in “Account preferences > Notifications”.

Each channel has its own controls for how notifications appear. Do they pop up on screen? Do they make a sound? Do they ignore do-not-disturb, etc? That's so you can choose to get a sound if someone mentions you, but no notification at all if someone new follows you (for example). All of that is also controlled from “Account preferences > Notifications”.

Android apps can not see what the user has set their notification settings to.

This is so that a malicious app can't refuse to run unless you allow its notifications to make a sound — apps can't “blackmail” you if you disable their notifications.

Android imposes two other limits on how apps can send notifications.

First, an app can only have about 50 notifications active at once. It's “about 50” because different Android devices might set that limit differently, and there's no way for an app like Tusky to find out what the limit has been set to, or what will happen if it posts more notifications than that.

Second, if an app posts too many notifications too quickly Android may silently drop those notifications, and the user will never see them.

How does all that affect how you use Tusky?

Better summaries means more alerts

Previously, all your Mastodon notifications would appear as a single collection of Android notifications with a “summary” notification that collapsed them all.

You could expand the summary notification to see the individual notifications.

It didn't matter what type of notification they were (follow, boost, mention, etc) they all got summarised together.

Turns out that caused a bunch of bugs, which we've squashed. For example, having just one summary notification meant that it could be sent to a channel that you have muted. And then you'd never see them.

That's fixed — notifications always go to the correct channel.

So now you'll see multiple summary notifications. One summary for all your “mention” notifications, one for all your “followed you” notifications, one for all your “boosted your post” notifications, and so on.

This means you can choose to e.g., swipe to dismiss all your “boosted your post” notifications, while leaving the “mentioned you” notifications intact.

However, if you receive a lot of notifications you will probably find you're alerted more than you used to be. The old behaviour was a bug. Tusky was incorrectly hiding some notifications. Now it's not.

You can always control your notification channel settings in “Account preferences > Notifications”. You may want to check that out and either disable some of them, or switch some of them to “silent”.

Older notifications make way for newer notifications

Tusky now limits the maximum number of notifications it will display to stay under that 50 limit I mentioned. If you have more than 50 active notifications Tusky will drop them, oldest first. They still appear on the Notifications tab, they just won't be created as Android notifications.

Suppose you have 30 active Tuksy Android notifications, and receive another 30 new Mastodon notifications. Tusky will remove the oldest ~ 10 from the existing Android notifications and then show the 30 new notifications and the remaining 20 of the previous ones.

Notifications are created more slowly

Tusky will create those 30 new Android notifications more slowly. Previously it would create them as quickly as possible, which ran the risk of them being silently dropped by the device. Now it creates them roughly once per second.

If you get a lot of notifications all at once you'll see this when the notification icons flash briefly on the Android status bar at the top of the screen.

Synchronised with other apps

Mastodon apps like Tusky — or your server's web interface — can also sychronise the ID of the “most recently fetched” notification with your Mastodon server.

So if you have your Mastodon home page and Tusky open at the same time (or Tusky running on two different devices) a given notification will only appear in one place, so you don't have to dismiss the same information in two different apps or devices.

I did the work here.

Along the way we discovered lots of ways that not-Mastodon-but-claim-to-follow-the-Mastodon-API servers are not quite compatible with documented behaviour.

And some problems with Mastodon itself, like https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/25245.

We also found and fixed some nasty bugs if you were logged in with multiple accounts; Tusky could write the data from one account to the database for another account. If you were on the beta track and suffered through the period where you would get dumped at the very beginning of your notification history then thanks for bearing with us while we found and fixed the problem.

Tobi (https://goblin.technology/@tobi) on the GoToSocial team helped debugging GoToSocial issues (https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/pull/1867, https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/pull/1734, https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/pull/1719),

Daniel (https://mastodon.social/@dansup/) is looking into the work that is needed for Pixelfed; right now Pixelfed incorrectly reports a new notification every time Tusky checks (https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/issues/4461) so if you have a Pixelfed account in Tusky you may want to mute those until Pixelfed is fixed.