Scheduled notifications

[12people]

It'd be great to be able to have an API for scheduling notifications, including repeat notifications.

This functionality is supported on Android, iOS, and macOS, so it'd be nice to see it on Linux too.

Examples of potential use-cases:

• Fitness apps: Regular reminders to exercise
• Health tracking apps: Regular reminders to take daily medication
• Health tracking apps: Regular reminders to note down symptoms
• Meditation apps: Regular reminders to meditate
• Habit apps: Regular reminders to perform a habit
• To do apps: Scheduled reminders about deadlines for certain tasks

Related to discussions #1495 and #1496 .

[Mikenux]

Reminders are more or less the same as alarms: see #1385.

I'm not really happy with the general idea of asking users to select either no scheduling, inexact or precise times, as the user need to know the case (i.e. why the app is asking for that?). Sadly, we don't have the necessary to clearly say an app want to send alarm or reminder notifications. We need to know what to ask and when to ask (and #1496 doesn't help regarding this as it is for when showing notifications to the user).

[12people]

As for when to ask for permission, what iOS, macOS and Android do is leave it up to the developers. However, they only allow asking a certain number of times. (After that, the user can only set notification permissions in the system settings for the app.) This way, the developer is encouraged to ask for permission at the right time in the right context, when the user is most likely to agree.

For example, in my workout app, I ask for the permission when the user goes to set up regular reminders in the app's Settings. Asking on startup would be both confusing and make it much more likely that the permission will be rejected.

[Mikenux]

Notification content and frequency is always defined in advance and then just handled by the OS.

Do you mean these are saved in the system and the app does not need to run (the system can display those without the app running)?

For the permission, do you have screenshots of the UX for the other systems? What is the sequence of events? (how reminders are added by the user, when the app is requesting to register them to system, what is said in the permission request, ....)

[12people]

Here's a screen recording from Android (iOS works basically the same way, just with a different look and wording for its permission dialog):

feeel-set-notification.mp4

(It's a bit hard to see, but the permission dialog appears after I tap on the "Daily reminder" switch.)

[12people]

And yes, these notifications are displayed without the app running at all.

That means the user doesn't have to worry about the app doing shady things in the background if they enable this permission. And it's also more battery-friendly, as the logic for the displaying of the notifications can be optimized entirely by the system.

[Mikenux]

Thanks. I think we can do better in wording. Notifying without the app running is something that has already been seen, and there are other options. I have #1377 for alarms, but I think we want to be as simple as possible, while covering as many cases as possible.

[Mikenux]

Another old proposal: #1026

Events and tasks are also scheduled things. They all have the same function (scheduling). They differ in some properties and importance (custom sound, groups). If going simple, we need to know when to ask and what to consider to be economic (power saving) as much as possible.