Android Oreo's Notification

[Seeyabye]

In the latest android oreo, automagic premium is showing up in the notification bar under 'Apps are running in the background'. Apparently from reading on XDA, (https://www.xda-developers.com/hide-app ... roid-oreo/), Google's trying to force developers to correct this behaviour. What is Automagic's stance on this? Will it be fix?

[Martin]

Hi,

The notification indicates that an app is running with foreground priority (like a music player). This is necessary to make Automagic run reliably and that it is not stopped by Android when you leave the user interface of Automagic. You can turn off 'Show status icon' in the preferences of Automagic to avoid this notification but this will also make Automagic unreliable. You could likely also use the mentioned plugin to snooze the notification (untested by me). I will also add an action to snooze notifications in one of the next versions so you don't have to install a plugin just for this feature.

Regards,
Martin

[sunscreem]

Martin,

Thanks for the reply to the OP. This notification is really annoying. It'll mean me uninstalling AP soon unless google address the problem.

Rob

[Desmanto]

Martin has updated the EAP version, to have new action Snooze notification for Oreo. I can't test it, don't have Oreo device. Please confirm. Check out at EAP thread http://automagic4android.com/forum/view ... f=7&t=6753
Counting since this thread was posted, it need only 4 days to implement this feature (2 days if you count from Martin's reply). While other Automation app will still keep on relying on another additional plugin.

[Bluscre]

While other Automation app will still keep on relying on another additional plugin.

I wonder which one you might mean ...

[Martin]

BTW: I'm also waiting for Google to provide better documentation about the regular/official way to avoid that Automagic is listed in this background notification. I found some posts of a Google employee somewhere in the internet that changing the notification priority should make the notification disappear which does not work in my tests so I'm really curious to see what they actually meant. I would be eager to incorporate a proper way to get rid of the notification in an official way if that does not mean that Automagic becomes unreliable or that features have to be removed.
The post of the Google employee also indicates that disabling setting 'Show status icon' could work, when the notification detector aka 'Access to notifications' of Automagic is turned on. I'll make some tests but I'm quite confident that some ROMs will break this or cause other kinds of unreliability.

Regards,
Martin

[mbirth]

An Android-dev-friend of mine also read into the thing and end result was that the notification is a result of people not knowing how many of their 300 apps are working in the background and thus blaming Android when their battery dies after half a day.

And he said there's no official way to remove the notification as it's by design. However, people built hacks.

[Martin]

It seems that Google just does not like it when apps use a foreground service but show the mandatory notification with a minimum priority so that the icon is not visible on the status bar. I've updated the Oreo-issues post with some more information:

... Another workaround is to show the Automagic icon in the status bar by disabling option Icon in expanded status bar. This will prevent that the background notification is shown, however the background notification will still be shown and Automagic will still be listed if any other app causes the notification to appear.

I would even say that the current implementation of the background notification of Android 8 is buggy for this reason.
An app like Google Play music that plays music in the background does not trigger the background notification since this app is exactly behaving the way that Google likes. As soon as an app like Automagic is started without icon on the status bar, the background notification is shown. But the notification lists both apps, Google Play music and Automagic. This means that you could have a few apps that behave absolutely perfect but one app does not enforce the status bar icon and now all apps are listed in the background notification so the user has no chance to find the app that triggers the background notification. The system blames apps that are behaving perfectly well. (This was also the reason that my experiments to change the notification priority had no visible effect, there was yet another app running on my phone that did not behave 'well').

Please star this issue if you want to express that you are not happy or just interested in the new background notification (adding a comment will send a mail with the new comment to all starred users so I recommend to just comment if you have something noteworthy to add, please don't just write a +1 comment on the issue tracker).

Regards,
Martin