Plugin: Notifications API

[a14n]

Provide an api to access to http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/notifiers/notifications.html and/or the iOS notifications.

[eseidelGoogle]

Is this the same as #201 ? @collinjackson is this covered by our gmm support?

[collinjackson]

I don't think this is GMM related, this is more about interacting with the Android messages on lock screen API locally. I imagine that devs are going to want to write a bit of Java code to do this unless are Dart wrappers are really good.

[Hixie]

@mit-mit You marked this as a milestone 3 issue, can you clarify your plans here?

[Hixie]

Moving to far future since this doesn't align with our current priorities.

[sgon00]

It's unbelievable this is moving to far future. How can a user get a notification without this plugin when the app is in background? Please don't tell me to use firebase again. Firebase service is blocked in many countries. Firebase support should never be a priority to me. and yeah, somebody may suggest me to write a plugin by myself. But the reason why I use flutter is because I don't want to write any java/kotlin/swift/objective-c codes. Sorry about my words, Thank the flutter team very much for the hard work. Moving to far future means there is no hope for me to have a simple notification support in flutter when the app is in background.

[mit-mit]

This issue is currently tagged 'self service', but it's probably not clear what we mean by that: The Flutter core team is currently 100% focused on resolving our last few overall blockers. These are things that due to architectural or complexity reasons are unlikely to happen unless we do them, for example the core plugin framework itself. We understand that it's painful when the exact feature you need isn't there already, but at the same time we need to prioritize the time we have.

In the case of the present plugin, we feel this is not blocked on anything missing in our framework, and of manageable complexity, so it's not entirely unreasonable to have a community sourced plugin fill the need (hence the self service tag). So if someone is interested in working on this, that would be very much appreciated, and we would gladly help with input, reviews, etc.

[csbenjamin]

I am building a music player and I would like to show a notification with a player control, so the user can know where the sound is coming from and easily stop the sound if he/she wants to

[csbenjamin]

In response to @mit-mit I am going to learn Java and how to develop native android apps first, so I can build this plugin if nobody do it.

[pakivika]

My use case is that I'd like to schedule an alarm 15min from now. Alarm should trigger even when the app was not in the foreground or if the screen was blank.

[mitchhymel]

@pakivika Have you tried the android_alarm_manager plugin?

I built a basic notification plugin for an app I'm working on. Find it here. The plugin isn't published, because I wouldn't recommend using the plugin as it is definitely not well tested, but I think it could be used as an example or proof of concept for someone to build further.

The reasons I don't recommend using it are:

1. It's not well tested.
2. I can't promise I'll have time to keep working on it to fully flesh it out.
3. Currently only Android is supported, and so the API closely matches the Android notification APIs.
4. Media style notifications are not supported yet.

[pakivika]

The plugin would be a solution for Android, but I'm building for iOS too.

[MaikuB]

I've tried creating a plugin that targets both Android and iOS for displaying basic notifications that also allows for them to scheduled. It can be found at https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/flutter_local_notifications. There's an example for scheduling notifications as well in my GitHub repo for it. Perhaps see if it'll work for you.

[MaikuB]

@mit-mit what's the best way to get in touch with your team to get said help :)

I've raised two issues (#16636 and #16662) but got questions on what's possible with the framework to handle certain scenarios

[eseidelGoogle]

In our recent user survey results, this was the 4th most asked for item. @mravn-google @collinjackson are there some easy wins we could get here?

[mravn-google]

@MaikuB has contributed https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/flutter_local_notifications. If that plugin does not represent a win, I'd like to understand why so we can help out (e.g. with resolving #16662).

[sgon00]

Hi, sorry to interrupt. I saw Hixie removed their assignment and Hixie removed this from the June 2019 milestone from this issue. So what is the plan now? I heard flutter team would support this soon.

[awulkan]

What's the status on this issue? It appears to be a heavily requested feature, but it doesn't seem like anyone is working on an official plugin for this. Or am I looking in the wrong places?

[MaikuB]

@awulkan my understanding is some of the Flutter team have used my plugin that you've come across and have been helping to look into related issues I've raised e.g. comparability with firebase_messaging. On a general note, if the community has worked on something, I believe the team tries to support that effort where possible, which would allow the team to focus their efforts elsewhere and avoid fragmenting the community

[awulkan]

@MaikuB Definitely, and I didn't mean to sound like your plugin wasn't good enough. It's just that this is such a basic and crucial part of applications that I think most developers want some "insurance" that it's prioritized by the Flutter team, and that it won't stop working because you for some reason stopped developing the plugin. It could potentially break a lot of applications.

Thanks for your, and all other contributors, work so far.

In the future I assume it would have to be integrated with Mac, Windows and the web as well to send notifications. That's a lot of integrations to maintain.

[MaikuB]

Definitely, and I didn't mean to sound like your plugin wasn't good enough.

All good and I didn't interpret it as such. Just sharing my views based on my experience and interactions with the Flutter team.

It's just that this is such a basic and crucial part of applications that I think most developers want some "insurance" that it's prioritized by the Flutter team, and that it won't stop working because you for some reason stopped developing the plugin. It could potentially break a lot of applications.

Understood though it's been common in other ecosystems to for plugins to be done by the community. With them being open sourced, others can contribute to help out. Should maintainers stop development and it's something that's widely used, chances are someone else will maintain a fork or ownership will be transferred

In the future I assume it would have to be integrated with Mac, Windows and the web as well to send notifications. That's a lot of integrations to maintain.

The Flutter team has a documented proposal for plugins that allow for endorsed platform-specific implementations of a plugin where one of the main benefits is to address this problem. From what I briefly saw for web, the API surface is small. For MacOS, the APIs appear to be the same for iOS. Most of my dev experience is with C# and .NET so should have Windows covered if and when it comes time to that though contributions are welcome :)

[stuartmorgan]

We'll leave this open to continue to track interest, but to set expectations: we currently don't have any plans to take on this significant new plugin work, and encourage people to use the existing, popular plugins from the community.

[devxpy]

Good point, I'll do so thanks.

Just curious if you followed up on this :)

Would love to be able to implement background notification handlers in flutter code

[stuartmorgan]

We'll leave this open to continue to track interest, but to set expectations: we currently don't have any plans to take on this significant new plugin work, and encourage people to use the various existing, popular plugins from the community.

Based on the updated guidance in https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Issue-hygiene#closing-issues, I'm going to close this issue, better reflecting the expectation that this is not something that the Flutter team plans to implement.

[github-actions]

This thread has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity after it was closed. If you are still experiencing a similar issue, please open a new bug, including the output of flutter doctor -v and a minimal reproduction of the issue.