izivkov/CasioGShockSmartSync

Please add notification icon in status bar

hakbr opened this issue · 4 comments

hakbr commented

Gongratulations with your great work!

Having tested your app to connect to my GA-B2100, it works as expected and syncs fine. The problem is that there is no easy way to see if the application is running and ready to sync with the watch (unlike the Casion Watches app). Casio Watches has a notification icon in the status bar to notify the user that the application is running in the background, and it would be excellent if you could add the same.

Why? Because the application is supposed to be always running on the phone, and it may get inadvertently closed by the user or killed by OOM. It is frustrating going through all open applications just to check if it is running.

Again, good job!

izivkov commented

Thanks for your comment.

We have gone back and forth on this issue a number of times. The current thinking is not to keep the app running explicitly for the following reasons:

  1. It uses up more battery.
  2. People are complaining about "Always in your face" notifications, which cannot be dismissed.
  3. Not reliable, and discouraged by the latest version of Android.

Here are some things you can do to have the app running:

  1. Disable battery optimization.
  2. Use Macrodroid to schedule restarting the app if not running before auto-updates, at 00:30, 6:30, 12:30, and 18:30.

Having said that, I am looking into some non-intrusive ways to have the app running all the time, and might update in the future if I can find one.

Ivo

hakbr commented

Thanks for your reply!

Auto restarts just before bluetooth updates would totally cut it for me. There would be no need to have the app running all the time, then.

Is it possible to implement that directly into the app?

izivkov commented

No, sorry, this cannot be implemented directly in the app.

I'm working on one option, amd will let you know in this thread if it works. In the meantime, just disable the battery optimization for the app.

Im general, Android apps are not ideal to run indefinately. The OS will just swap them out of memory when it feels like.

izivkov commented

I experimented with adding an icon to keep the app from being swapped out of memory. While it ran longer, the negatives outweigh the positive effects, so I did not include it in the next release. I left the code there though, so maybe someone will pick it up and implement this feature in the future.

I'll close this issue for now. Thanks for your input.
Ivo