Signal-android: No notifications

[DmKaleid]

we are having problems with the notifications, they just don't show up.

Either the phone does not vibrate or the notification sound does not play. It's the only thing missing for my colleagues to migrate to the app

[Edu4rdSHL]

Please take a look to https://dontkillmyapp.com/

[jharrison03]

As of two updates ago, my phone will no longer vibrate or play a sound when messages arrive, unless the Signal app is opened (Android 5.1, Signal 4.62.3)

@Edu4rdSHL, can you please be more specific about what I should be looking for on that page which addresses this issue?

[Edu4rdSHL]

@jharrison03 most notifications issues are caused by phone vendors including their "battery optimizer" software in their ROMs. The notifications problem is normally solved disabling battery optimizations for the Signal app. In the page I posted are some well-known manufactures having this problem, clicking on one of they give you the instructions to disable battery optimizations for the application.

If you want to know more in depth about what I'm talking, see https://dontkillmyapp.com/problem

[osmgit]

I had the same problem, I reported this back here https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9533

My fix was to upgrade to Android 10 and now notifications are workings for me. (I'm using LineageOS.)

BUT

It's still happening to everyone else I know using Signal on older Android versions. They have to click on Signal to see any new messages. No notifications are sent and the Signal icon does not show a red icon with new messages either.

Just saw this again on my mum's phone. Wondering why she hadn't seen any of our Signal messages for months. So I tapped on Signal and boom all the messages came through upon opening the app.

[deosrc]

My notifications work fine as I've excluded Signal from battery optimisation but I know others who have had issues with this and it's a pretty big issue for new user uptake.

I've seen some other apps request permission to be ignored from battery optimisations and it seems fairly straightforward to implement, however, it seems google can be quite difficult about apps on the play store using it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33114063/how-do-i-properly-fire-action-request-ignore-battery-optimizations-intent

Realistically, I think it's the only way to get non-technical users on signal (unless a technical user configures the power saving for them), so it might be worth a shot. The only other option would be as the stack overflow answer suggests of prompting the user to do it themselves but again, it doesn't seem very friendly to non-technical users and will probably put them off if they have to go digging around the android settings.