pendell

Pendell

@pendell

Current Hyperfixation: Wizard of Oz

  • He/Him

I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.

Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.

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pendell
@pendell
exerian
@exerian
cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

one of my fave things about the modern world is how often I get a notification and it leads to a screen like this. press back (the only option) and get the home screen. notification is gone. no way to ever find out what it was

my impression of the situation is something like: there is no interprocess communication on android. you can ask an app to open, and you can leave a little message in an inbox that it can check if it wants. those messages are invisible and once read they evaporate. if the app gets distracted on its way to checking the mail, welp, poopsie whoopsie, all the mail goes in the trash

great way for computing to work

exerian
@exerian

i've been seeing a lot of this kind of crap on my android. also lots of notification 'dings' but when i look at my phone there's not a single notification to be seen.

pendell
@pendell

I've gotten a couple of blank notifications. Like, it's from an app, but there's no notification in my notification. Just blank space where information ought to be. Tapping on them does nothing, they just have to be dismissed. Ghost notifications.

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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

NireBryce
@NireBryce

the reason text selection for copy and paste on android is so weird, I've heard, is because it has no idea of how the text is formatted on the display, just that it exists and where the linebreaks are.

so it can't even read app layout, just the text stream.

I have no idea if that's strictly due to no inter-process stuff, but I wouldn't be surprised.

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wolf-apparatus
@wolf-apparatus

i suspect it’s not quite an IPC issue but something similar - more likely the app gets woken up and told “hey someone tapped the notification” and says “cool i will tell the UI about this…. ok done! notification handled!” and then the UI code fucks up on it and fails to render.

issue is with the app’s own structure rather than the OS since it just doesn’t bother checking that the UI displayed successfully before dismissing the notification, probably because those components were written by two different groups of people who don’t talk and none of the frameworks involved give one the idea that should be something they should be thinking about

so basically it’s worse because despite this being a near-universal problem there’s probably not one place we can fix it

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gotyaoi
@gotyaoi

No, inboxes would be sensible. In android, notifications can fire "Intents", which is basically a bundle of "Activity(screen) in the app to open to" and "any data associated with the notification". It is up to the developer to both:

  1. Write the notification code so that it properly sends the Intent.
  2. Write the application code to properly handle being opened to a specific screen.
  3. Write the Activity code to properly receive the data from the Intent.

Should there be any mistakes, well, we see the result. Didn't build the notification correctly so it has the wrong Activity or bad data in the Intent? Failure. Application responds to opening a certain Activity by firing off some update task and going to a different Activity? Failure. Activity just ignores any data in the Intent? Failure. Cross platform frameworks exacerbate this, due to trying to paper over the differences. The code that controls the application and the code that controls the notification get out of sync. The format of Intents change out from under your code. etc.

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

yeah, that was my understanding, but does my metaphor not still apply? intents are closer to "an email that the app gets one chance to read and respond to" than "an imperative API that the app is expected to process and positively respond to"

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gotyaoi
@gotyaoi

I think the distinction that I'm drawing is that it's basically up to the the app to hold onto the message and do the right thing with it. Like, once the app has the message, it has control, including the control to drop the message on the floor, or decide that it needs to display the main screen or w/e. Once the Activity receives the Intent, it is running in the foreground.

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