Notifications are broken on 1.3.14 F-Droid

[konomikitten]

Steps to reproduce

1. Enable Caffeine for testing purposes this prevents your phone sleeping.
2. Observe that no notifications come through when Element is closed and not running as a background app, even though the "Listening for notifications" persistent notification is present.
3. Launch Element and then press the home button to move it to the background (running as a background app), note that no notifications come through.
4. Finally bring Element to the foreground but do not have it focused on a chat that would generate a notification and you will finally have notifications displayed.

Summing up, currently for the F-Droid build notifications are broken in every aspect unless Element is in the foreground.

The problem was not occurring on the previous Element build from F-Droid (1.3.9).

Outcome

What did you expect?

Notifications should be received no matter what state Element is in.

What happened instead?

No notifications are received unless the app is open and in the foreground.

Your phone model

Asus Zenfone Selfie ZD551KL

Operating system version

Android 7.1.2 (LineageOS 14.1)

Application version and app store

Element version 1.3.14 olm version 3.2.10 from F-Droid

Homeserver

matrix.org

Your phone model

Motorola Moto E Dual SIM (2nd gen) XT1521

Operating system version

Android 10 (LineageOS 17.1)

Application version and app store

Element version 1.3.14 olm version 3.2.10 from F-Droid

Homeserver

matrix.org

Will you send logs?

Yes

[konomikitten]

Both phones have sent rage shake reports with the heading and issue number of this bug report.

[fabienli]

same issue on my samsung galaxy s9

[ouchadam]

does this also occur when Caffeine is not running?

[konomikitten]

@ouchadam yes still a problem without caffeine on.

[ouchadam]

thanks for raising, it looks like there's been a regression which caused the optimised for battery mode to no longer schedule the next sync after completing the first one in the background, a temporary workaround is to select the optimised for realtime in the Settings -> Notifications -> Background sync mode

[konomikitten]

a temporary workaround is to select the optimised for realtime in the Settings -> Notifications -> Background sync mode

How heavily will this drain a phones battery compared to optimised for battery?

[ouchadam]

it's hard to say as different ROMs/OEMs have unique battery optimisations, for most cases where the device is being used throughout the day there isn't too much of a difference, if a device is sat idle and not being used at all then there would be a much bigger difference in battery usage.

[konomikitten]

@ouchadam pretty sure once I changed the sync setting and leave Element open on a channel like say #matrix that it just started consuming tons of cpu and started leaking memory please advise. Screenshot of Element resource hogging on my phone via adb shell htop:

[bmarty]

This issue will be fixed in 1.3.16.
I open a dedicated issue for your latest concern @konomikitten

[Karamelmar]

Got the notifications running again after switching "Background Sync" in Settings > Notifications from "Optimized for battery" to "Optimized for real time".

[marcusmueller]

@Karamelmar this did not fix the issue for me; 1.3.15 android via fdroid.

Neither did giving unrestricted network access. This is a rather severe regression.

[damnms]

same here, just noticed a message sent 3 days ago from my mom. she called me on my phone asking why i dont respond to the message... nice