Elevate Push Notifications from WayDroid to UT?

bamboy360

Not sure if this is intended behavior.
When apps in waydroid trigger a push notification, my phone will trigger a sound, but the Ubuntu Touch system will not register the notification or message - which can be very confusing.

Many apps I use for communication, such as Signal, are not available in UT via OpenStore. Others require Google Play Services (Which I have now set up correctly in waydroid). So it seems my only option is to run these android apps in WayDroid.

Is there a way to route Waydroid's notifications to UT's notification manager, so they are all in the same place, including accessible from the lock screen?

Moem

@bamboy360 As far as I know, as of today there is not. It's not intended behaviour, but it's the way it works because Waydroid's notifications don't make it out of the container.

But there are other ways to use Signal. I wrote about the way I use Signal on UT here:
https://forums.ubports.com/post/84898
I must note that on Cinny, encrypted chats (such as all Signal chats are) do not pass the contents of their messages on to notifications. As far as I know, that is intended behaviour.

bamboy360

Sad. I am getting very discouraged how much disconnect there is from containerized apps in Waydroid, and the main Ubuntu Touch system.

YouTube for example, while playing video, is letting the system enter lock/sleep, as I just discovered a few minutes ago. (which the google play version has more features I'd prefer to have (incl. premium), and is not simply a web browser like the OpenStore version)

There's lots more android apps I'm not even mentioning here, that I was led to believe would fully run as expected in containers. I mean I guess that's more or less the case, but damn am I giving up a lot in the name of security/privacy.

Surely it'd be easy to implement it so the UT system reads the raw memory of the waydroid instance, to retrieve notifications, then pass those along? /sarcasm

At the very least, it seems the two systems have enough things in common that they could be linked somehow, much like how their audio and video systems have been.
Then again maybe the UT devs don't want to go full hog on support of waydroid containers, which seems to be its own project. Or like most things FOSS, it's a time restriction.

Moem

@bamboy360 said in Elevate Push Notifications from WayDroid to UT?:

that I was led to believe would fully run as expected in containers

Aye, I think herein lies the rub. Maybe your expectations were set too high.

Yes, there is a cost involved in gaining more privacy. It's paid in loss of convenience. It's up to each of us whether we think that's a good deal. No one will (or should) look down on you for making a choice in that regard that's different from their own.

bamboy360

Researching this more, I found this issue on WayDroid's github, so they're at least aware this is a restriction.
https://github.com/waydroid/waydroid/issues/211

Someone there mentioned using KDEConnect as a workaround. I might look into that next.

arubislander

@bamboy360 said in Elevate Push Notifications from WayDroid to UT?:

Someone there mentioned using KDEConnect as a workaround. I might look into that next.

I suspect this was aimed primarily at desktop Linux, although any mobile Linux where KDE/GConnect shows notifications would work as well. Unfortunately, at the moment UT is not one of those where it would work out of the box.

But feel free to experiment, maybe you can make it work.

bamboy360

Just an update, I gave up on trying the KDEConnect workaround. I did some deep investigation on resolving the issue within Waydroid itself, and documented my progress. It's definitely a feature-request in Waydroid. https://github.com/waydroid/waydroid/issues/211

I haven't done any more work on it for a while, since my last post on github. There are a few libs being used in Waydroid, which I linked to, which have sparse documentation.
I don't have deep enough knowledge of these languages and platforms to be able to fix this easily - not to mention android's workflow for builds. Wasn't able to do a build of LineageOS on my PC; some incompatibility with package versions.

It'd be nice to resolve this for everybody who uses Waydroid, but IRL is taking priority for now.