Notifications: Out of the comfort zone?
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I'm completely ignorant, but does every phone brand have a push server for Telegram, for instance? Or all the Android devices use Google services for this?
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@wgarcia No they are using Google´s https://developers.google.com/cloud-messaging/ for example. It has nothing to do with the phone brand, only with the operating system.
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@tomoqv said in Notifications: Out of the comfort zone?:
s too difficult to implement, maybe there could be some kind of "pull service" that could be enabled/disabled on a per app basis?
Yes basically possible. Only disadvantage is that every App has to implement a "lean worker" that does some job and can be called form the outside, optionally allowing forceful termination if it hangs or suddenly consumes 100% CPU etc. For example in Telegram that means to establish a full session to the network, filter groups that are not muted, count the messages and finally send the result locally. The session initiation in Telegram is not cheap - its heavy lifting, because it is expected to do it only once. And thats causing battery drain. One App is ok, imagine several messengers, sync clients (calendars) etc. All of them need to make their heavy session construct & teardown every 5mins or so... Thats why push was invented xD
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@garro said in Notifications: Out of the comfort zone?:
uld run the program on their own workstation, so this is not a so big problem, in my opinion. Anyway the data should be stored in
No thats not so easy. Services like Telegram want to send actually notifications to one service only. If we can get the same agreement like Canonical had with Telegram they will require actually us to accept their data flow on a stable server. How we could get individual agreements with all users towards Telegram
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As for question 2, when I was working in Canonical I made a change to account-polld (the service which gets invoked every 5 minutes in your device to check if you have new notifications for any of your accounts) and I rewrote it in order to allow third party developers to write plugins for it.
Plugins are in fact separate processes which communicate with the daemon via JSON messages (in a format similar to the one used by the push server), so they can be written in any language.The code for the service is here: https://github.com/mardy/account-polld
The existing plugins (written in Go) are here: https://github.com/mardy/account-polld-plugins-goUnfortunately these changes got never merged into trunk, so if someone is making new images, please use the links above for building these components.
I'm willing to maintain and develop further these components in my spare time (same goes for the Online Accounts feature which I was maintaining in Ubuntu), so feel free to reach out to me in case you have questions on how to use them.
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I'm starting to understand the complexity of notifications without the support of Canonical. It looks like we will have to go back to SMS for a while, fortunately they are free at least for me nowadays.
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@Flohack Is not possile to poll the servers through Telegram APIs, as we would without the push service or when you are on the desktop? The same you could do with e-mails.
The Workstation/server wouldn't have battery problems, so it's not a problem to poll frequently. -
How does Sailfish handles telegram notification ? I'm not sure that their telegram app is officially supported.
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@ernest I dont know, maybe you can find out?
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@garro Can you explain? You mean you run a separate software on your Desktop which will create the notifications and send them to the phone?
BR
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Could we just store the notifications locally? There's no real advantage to not doing it.
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If we're talking about Sailorgram, the app is launched at startup, running as a daemon invoked by systemd. When the user taps its icon in the apps launcher, a message is sent to the app via DBus, requiring to show the GUI. When the user close that GUI, the main process keeps running in background.
This might be a solution, but it involves a revision of the confinement policies and the whole app life-cycle story.
EDIT: I'd like to make it clear, daemons are something shouldn't be implemented in the current platform, IMHO, since they might be a bit dangerous...
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We can't live without any background services forever, so would it maybe be possible to have a background daemon where applications can register micro-services that the user can allow or block? That way applications could have stripped-down background options (to poll for notifications, for example) and the user could decide between functionality or battery life and you don't need a notification server and everything can be done on the client-side. I understand that it would be a lot of work and it's probably only feasible for the non-legacy, but might that be an option?
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@NeoTheThird
If I try to understand the strategy Canonical used for writing the current platform limitations, I see that running daemons - without any particular limitation - might turn to be too risky.There's already some way someone could potentially write an app that "soft-bricks" the device, but the only thing that prevents it is the absence of daemons - yep, it's something very stupid I've tried some time ago. XD
This is clearly one of the bad scenarios I can think of right now, but it's still something to consider if you want to change the current strong confinement policies, IMO.We actually need to think at a solution - that's true - which could be something similar to BlackBerryOS 10, or just running a daemon like in SailfishOS (BTW, apps with daemons are not allowed to be released in the SFOS store).
In any case, if we want to allow applications to be run as daemons, then, I would suggest that those apps needs to be open source, in order to be manually examined before they get released on the Open Store. -
@sverzegnassi Ok, i did not express myself clearly there: My point was to not let every app break the confinement rules and create their own background services, my point was to create a unified master-service that applications can then can ask to register their own service on (with the user moderating it). This is not only useful for notification services, but also for other background services like music playback with the screen switched off, which is a really nice feature.
I totally agree with you, we can't have every app going around being a cowboy, but practicality beats purity. We should definitely restrict closed-source apps from breaking confinement, but of course this is no guarantee for safety either. You can easily hide malicious functionality in a block of obscure code... We should not panic too much about this, though.
Tangent:
Some points of confinement will have to be over-thought, like the content-hub for example. Of course it makes sense to have rules in place, but practicality beats purity. A calculator app does not need to have write access to the home folder, for example, but a text editor does. And creating local copies for everything seems a little weird... -
@NeoTheThird said in Notifications: Out of the comfort zone?:
ack with the screen switched off, which is a really nice fea
I think it's an essential feature
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@Flohack Exactly, when the phone connects to it asking for them
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@NeoTheThird Sorry, I misunderstood your words - it's not your fault - I just thought micro-services -> daemons.
That's something that would allow us to effectively keep control of what's running in background.
However, some of my observations are still valid; I suggest you to give a look at the "Headless apps" for BBOS10, it's worth a read.Headless apps - BlackBerry Native
We'd need to limit CPU and memory usage for background services, a network bandwidth limitation would be desirable too. Also, services should be forced to complete their tasks within 20 seconds, in order to preserve battery life.
See Resource Management for Headless apps.
However that wouldn't solve some security concerns - we'd still need to provide a certain amount of isolation between the micro-service/headless-app and the main GUI. This would require a change in the Click package specifications, and we come back to the (infamous) question we still have to answer: Click, Snap or what else?
If there's something I like of the Maemo/Meego/SailfishOS implementation, that is its simplicity. It's pretty straightfoward to implement "local" notifications that way.
I still prefer a BBOS-like solution, but I think that we should initially focus on how to get dekko and telegram-app notifications working, understand their requirements, and then see which solution fits better.-- About ContentHub,
I've been using it in almost all of my projects, from the DocumentViewer to InstantFX, with the authorization from the Canonical Security Team to use the "extra" permissions granted to Core Apps, or even fighting for sorting out a good user experience for an application (InstantFX) that requires a persistent access to user's Pictures folder.There's for sure some problem with ContentHub: although it has seen an increase of its capabilities (e.g. print and clipboard support), its model has never changed since 2013. I recall that a mime type filtering (instead of those "well-known" content types) has been promised some years ago, but never landed.
I believe that user's public data (in "~/<xdg_user_directories>") should be consumed by any app or device that requires it. Otherwise there wouldn't be any need for data to be saved there, but we'd use apps private folders instead.
However I still think that ContentHub might be useful for those applications that doesn't require a persistent access to user's folder.
In any case, we might also want to change the ContentHub experience a bit:
- We may want to keep the current "peers model" for accessing private data owned by a single application. This is how it works now, and it's perfect for such scenario.
- We may want to add a file picker UI directly in the ContentHub - like in Android. That'd be useful with public data, once we have mime type support.
Canonical wanted to enhance security. That came at a cost: applications can only access to their local copy of a file.
I think the keyword here should be "privacy": applications can access user's data, but we explicitly inform the user of any change or access to her folder.I think we should get in touch with previous ContentHub maintainer: if there's a way to change AppArmor restriction during the app executions, adding some temporary read permission, that would be great.
Generally speaking: major issues are:
- Content export: the app loses focus, therefore the user flow is interrupted.
- Content peer UI: e.g. gallery-app, it's not much usable, IMHO
- Well-known content types: not something really flexible.
Content import is annoying - that's true - and I'd like things to be handle differently. However receiving a copy of the original file is not so traumatic yet, if well handled.
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@sverzegnassi What about using links instead of local copies? This would solve the space issue while still keeping almost the same granularity that UT currently ships and that I really appreciate a lot.
