Push notifications for mobile

[losuler]

Problem

Currently when Convos is in the background on Android notifications don't appear which means the only way to know if you have notifications is to open Convos. As Convos can be installed as a PWA through Chrome or Firefox on Android, I think not having push notifications should be considered as missing an essential feature.

Solution

The best solution is to use the web push API^[1][2] as it doesn't require setting up FCM (this is handled underneath by the browser^[3][4], which itself uses FCM on Chrome or Autopush for Firefox and thus doesn't effect battery life), is an open standard and which creates native notifications on Android. This is currently how The Lounge has push notifications implemented^[5].

Previous Issues

https://github.com/convos-chat/convos/issues/312, https://github.com/convos-chat/convos/issues/493.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API [2] https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/push-notifications/how-push-works [3] https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/push-notifications/faq#what_is_the_deal_with_gcm_fcm_web_push_and_chrome [4] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/07/web-push-interop-wins [5] https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge/pull/1124

[jhthorsen]

I changed the title, since this doesn’t work on iOS.

[losuler]

Thought I'd change the title back now, as it looks like Apple have finally implemented web push in iOS/iPadOS, it now being live in the 16.4 beta 1^1. Might be worth mentioning web push was also added to Safari on macOS mid last year^2.