@ByteHamster and I discussed this again during the ‘Needs: Decision’ meeting, thanks to a new recent feature request. We now have 3 tickets on the topic:
- Add action buttons to new episode notifications · Issue #7793 · AntennaPod/AntennaPod · GitHub
- Show episode titles (abbreviated if needed) in new podcast notification · Issue #7327 · AntennaPod/AntennaPod · GitHub → the only open one
- Better notification for new episodes · Issue #7170 · AntennaPod/AntennaPod · GitHub
Further thoughts from my side:
Overlap with Inbox screen
That’s a fair point. They already are optional, in fact: they have to be enabled at podcast level. In that sense, it serves a slightly different purpose than the ‘Inbox’ screen (although very closely related).
UI clutter & grouping
If we group notifications as suggested before, the UI clutter would be limited. It’s also possible to swipe away all notifications in one go.
Question is how we group:
- At app level (everything together)
- Per podcast
- Benefit: when receiving notifications for several podcasts, and you have many, you can remove all notifications from one podcast while maintaining those of another.
I’d be in favour of per-podcast grouping; I have notifications enabled for two podcasts and prioritise one over the other (more likely to discard one podcast’s notifications than that of the other).
Notification content
For the group:
- if we group at app level:
[app icon] AntennaPod • # new episodes in # podcasts • #d - if we group at podcast level:
[app icon] AntennaPod • Podcast title • # new episodes • #d
For each notification:
- if we group at app level:
[podcast image] Episode title Podcast title - if we group at podcast level:
Episode title
That means:
- no indication of the notification type (‘New episode’)
- no display of description → Maybe we should do this actually (e.g. crop at first 3 lines)
- if we do, it’d make sense to use expandable notifications
- if we don’t, no need for expandable notifications
- no display of podcast cover if we group at podcast level (it’d have to be at group level because at episode level it’d be a lot of repetition, but I’d say having our logo is more important at the group level)
- no display of episode cover (at this size I think it doesn’t add much if any benefit) → We could add this in future, see note below the images.
(Interestingly, Netflix has different images for the miniature version and for the expanded image, and the expanded images also have different image sizes. I wonder if it’s possible to display a 1:1 ration there. It would be a great to use images specified with a given
aspect-ratio
(e.g. 16/9
) or purpose
(e.g. social
) as being discussed in <podcast:image> - refinement of <podcast:images> · Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace · Discussion #694 · GitHub)
Notification actions
That’s also what’s requested in all three GitHub issues. We would have to decide which actions we would enable. I would say:
‘Open’ (launches episode detail screen)→ Tapping on the notification itself should do this- ‘Ignore’ (when implemented via #5237, and ‘Remove from inbox’ until then)
- ‘Download’ (is Settings > Playback > Enqueue downloaded enabled by default?)
- unless in Settings > User interface “Prefer streaming” is enabled, in which case ‘Add to queue’ would make more sense
- If we only want to have the ‘Add to queue’ option for all cases, I think implementing Auto download podcasts in queue is a prerequisite
I would not make a setting for this. There aren’t too many options here, and you won’t see the actions until you ‘expand’ the notification.
Technical considerations
We should adequately handle auto-downloaded episodes: if a new episode notification was created and then auto-download kicks in for that episode, then the notification should be updated (with setOnlyAlertOnce()
, e.g. to remove the ‘Download’ action) or removed.
(What do we currently have as the notification ID
? If we concatenate e.g. 1
for new episodes with the episode ID from the database, we should be safe without storing the notification ID itself.)