Update App Icon Notification Count

[luke-]

Not all HumHub notifications are push notifications. It would be good if even when the app is closed, the count behaves in the same way as the HumHub notification count.

Perhaps we can also send Silent Firebase push notifications that only change the counter.

[PrimozRatej]

A silent Firebase push would work nicely.

[luke-]

Related: #54

[marc-farre]

@PrimozRatej Can you check this issue on iOS? https://community.humhub.com/content/perma?id=289193

Even though all notifications are read when logged in, the badge remains unchanged.

[PrimozRatej]

Hey @marc-farre, sorry for the late response.

When the user opens a notification, the updated notification count should be sent to the mobile app.
We have the updateNotificationCount JS channel for this, with the data format: {"count": }.

Although this was designed some time ago, we did not take multiple instances into account.

Example: Let’s say the Community instance has 6 unread notifications and Cuzzy has 4 unread notifications. This means we would need to show a total of 10, but currently, it is designed to show either 6 or 4 depending on which instance triggered updateNotificationCount last.

We probably want to display the notification count in the opener list for each instance also, and somehow store the number of unread notifications.

[marc-farre]

@PrimozRatej Sounds good. Can I help on this?

[PrimozRatej]

@marc-farre I will message you on Element to discuss the best approach for this; it will require some backend integration.

[PrimozRatej]

Hey @marc-farre , I've done some research regarding this task. I think we already have most of the things ready to implement this feature.

There would be 2 mechanisms that would help calculate the total number of unopened notifications across all instances:

1. ChannelAction.updateNotificationCount JS channel action - We would need to trigger this channel every time there's a change in a user's unopened notifications. This channel is already implemented on the backend; it just needs to also be triggered when the user opens any notification.

2. Push notification with notification count - When a user gets a notification (push), the push notification needs to also include information about how many unopened notifications the user has. I think this is already implemented on the backend, see: https://github.com/humhub/fcm-push/blob/c8fbc11e0efa28ca9bd0675d86dd448b3e938212/drivers/DriverInterface.php#L13 - the notificationCount property.

3. Silent push (optional) - An edge case for this would be if the user is using HumHub on the web app. In this scenario, the JS channel won't trigger on the mobile app and the count would stay the same until the user opens the instance on the mobile app. For this, we could use silent push notifications. Whenever the user's count changes, a silent push is sent, and if the app is in the background state, it will update the count even if the user is using the app in a browser. The app would get the info about notification count over Firebase push notification.

Note: If we use silent push notifications, we wouldn't need updateNotificationCount JS channel anymore; we would trust this to Firebase then.