What problem does Push Notifications solve that other notification mechanics, like say email or desktop notifications, don't solve? I'm not saying we'll never do this, just it seems exceedingly complex and generally marginal actual value.

I have email notifications disabled wherever possible. When I shut down my computer, it'd be super useful to be able to get push notifications to my phone.

I think that's maybe better resolved with T7004. My concern is this solves no new problems (or problems we're already tracking and would resolve in other ways). I prefer email notifications when out and about on my phone since they contain more information and are easily replied to. Push Notifications seems like a step backwards from a usability perspective.

Push Notifications are far more suitable for Conpherence where sending emails is extremely spammy (especially because emails are either always sent or never sent). Push notifications would allow you to bundle multiple messages into a single notification like Slack does.

The lack of push notifications is probably the primary reason I don't see people using Conpherence (both at work and at uni). Nobody wants to use a messaging system that either spams you with email or gives you no mobile notifications when people are trying to contact you.

But you still need T7004 to effectively manage when we can bother you about stuff. And if we had that and Super Herald Pro XL (if I am not online and someone mentions me, send me a text), you could make the actual benefit of "push notifications" fairly marginal (and still hard to build/configure vs email). Don't get me wrong, this sounds cool, though.

@Yomi is this task meant to solve a problem you have today with Phabricator today? If so, what is it? https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabcontrib/article/feature_requests/#describe-problems

I never want to get emails for Conpherence, unless they're summary messages of conversations that I haven't already read, regardless of T7004. I do want to get immediate notifications on my phone for conversations that are happening, I just don't want it to litter my inbox.

I'm going to try an analogy here: Sending an email is the electronic equivalent of posting a letter. Right now Conpherence is a messaging system that sends you a physical letter for every sentence someone speaks in a face to face conversation; that's the metaphorical equivalent of what sending emails for a messaging system is like.

(On a separate note, looking at an email requires me to view the email, expand the "this section is common in the thread so we won't show it by default", click the link and then reply; push notifications would take me straight to the Conpherence web interface)

Ah sorry, I should be more specific. I think push notifications in a chat app are supremely awesome, but for all of Phabricator its not something I think is useful. For Conpherence, I'd rather build an app for mobile than force people to use web (which would have push).

Oh no, I definitely wouldn't want push notifications for all of Phabricator either; that would defeat the purpose of having a separate channel for high frequency messaging. I just want them for Conpherence :P

I also think the Conpherence mobile web app is pretty reasonable, it just needs push notifications to get people to come back to it. Building a native app is something that can be done way down the road, while push notifications for Conpherence is something that can be done shorter term to make Conpherence useful now.

In T8924#127702, @chad wrote:

But you still need T7004 to effectively manage when we can bother you about stuff. And if we had that and Super Herald Pro XL (if I am not online and someone mentions me, send me a text), you could make the actual benefit of "push notifications" fairly marginal (and still hard to build/configure vs email). Don't get me wrong, this sounds cool, though.

@Yomi is this task meant to solve a problem you have today with Phabricator today? If so, what is it? https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabcontrib/article/feature_requests/#describe-problems

Not sure if I'd call it a problem. It'd just allow me to close my tab instances of phabricator and still receive notifications.
(and then, maybe I could disable emails entirely being sent to me if it were robust enough...but that's just me thinking ahead...)

That's about the extent of my problem...

Hi,

I've been playing with push notifications for some time and I think web push native notifications could be very handy here, especially for Conpherence.

I could propose a solution and submit a diff for it if you think such notifications would be nice to have.

Support for push notifications is coming to Firefox soon, so with FF and Chrome's support, this would cover most of the users and their browsers.

For a start I'd just show a notification that there's been some activity on the user's channel/site. They'd have to go to the home page of their Phabricator installation and check details manually. Later on we could add detailed messages but that would take longer to implement as it would require some more data storage changes (additional tables).

Reason for that is that a Push notification is just a "ping" without any payload. Once the browser receives the ping it can then fetch details from the server and display the contents in the notification.

Does it sound okay for you?