1533057 - GV API for Web Notifications (without Web Push)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(GeckoView :: General, enhancement, P1)

Description

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Web Push Notifications can work without Web Push (bug 1343678) while the browser is running, though the usefulness is limited.

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/push-notifications/

Comment 1

[JR Conlin [:jrconlin,:jconlin]]

Following up a bit here.

We recently released the WebPush Rust Component as part of Android-Components. The component lets you manage subscriptions and decrypt messages received through our Webpush server.

I also think it's important to note that there's two separate APIs at play here, there's WebPush (which delivers end to end encrypted content), and the Notification API (which displays a message to the user). While I know you can display Notifications without WebPush, I don't believe that you can call WebPush subscription from inside an app. You can call it from inside a web page, because it communicates with the underlying webpush service, but I don't believe it's a system level call. I believe the preferred mechanism on android is to call FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging), which is very different and doesn't really provide the same functions. We use FCM for message delivery in the background, and it doesn't lend itself to public use.

Comment 2

[James Willcox (:snorp) ([e-mail]) (he/him)]

Right, we're just referring to Notification API in this bug.

Comment 3

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Adding [geckoview:fenix:m7] whiteboard tag because we should figure out our Web Notifications plans in Q2.

Comment 4

[James Willcox (:snorp) ([e-mail]) (he/him)]

This gets routed through GeckoAppShell[0] currently, via AndroidAlerts.cpp[1]. We'll probably want to re-plumb that to use something else for GV.

[0] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/c0ca77697c6868482f30af873ec8069f2c080a34/mobile/android/geckoview/src/main/java/org/mozilla/gecko/GeckoAppShell.java#522
[1] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/widget/android/AndroidAlerts.cpp

Comment 5

[James Willcox (:snorp) ([e-mail]) (he/him)]

Here's a proposed API. Initially I was thinking we'd have a WebNotifierController or similar class, but it's probably fine to just put the delegate on the GeckoRuntime directly. It does seem like this could get out of hand at some point, though.

class GeckoRuntime {
    void setWebNotificationDelegate(WebNotificationDelegate delegate);
}

interface WebNotificationDelegate {
   void onShowNotification(WebNotification notification);
   void onCloseNotification(WebNotification notification);
}

class WebNotification {
    public String title;
    public String text;
    /* other data members as required */

    public void click();
    public void dismiss();
}

Comment 6

[Alvina Waseem [:awaseem]]

Attachment: Bug 1533057 - Created Web Notifications API.

Comment 7

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

A-C issue: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/android-components/issues/2295

Comment 8

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/6d823f106e69
Created Web Notifications API. r=geckoview-reviewers,agi,snorp

Comment 9

[Oana Pop-Rus]

Backed out changeset 6d823f106e69 (bug 1533057) for Android mochitest failure in AndroidAlerts.cpp

Push with failure: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/#/jobs?repo=autoland&resultStatus=success%2Csuperseded%2Ctestfailed%2Cbusted%2Cexception%2Crunnable&searchStr=android%2C7.0%2Cx86-64%2Cdebug%2Cmochitests%2Ctest-android-em-7.0-x86_64%2Fdebug-geckoview-mochitest-e10s-3%2Cm%283%29&revision=6d823f106e69afd267b50f2737734ebb9c2ed71f

Failure log: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/logviewer.html#/jobs?job_id=261867472&repo=autoland&lineNumber=7519

Backout: https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/691f28f0517fd094c983038165cd6fb6683bc852

Comment 10

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/2d59ce318c46
Created Web Notifications API. r=geckoview-reviewers,agi,snorp

Comment 11

[Andrei Ciure[:aciure]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/2d59ce318c46

Comment 12

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

firefox69=wontfix because we don't need to uplift the Web Notifications API to GV 69 Beta. It can ride the trains with GV 70.