Notification Settings: On/Off toggle hides WordPress.com notification settings, but turns off Push notifications

[thehenrybyrd]

Expected behavior

Since I am in the "Notifications" tab of the app, which displays WordPress.com notifications, I expected this toggle to turn on/off all WordPress.com notifications.

Actual behavior

This toggle turns off push notifications from the app.
In addition, this toggle hides all WordPress.com notification settings.
This is counterproductive, since the toggle does not turn off WordPress.com notifications.

Steps to reproduce the behavior

1. Head into Notifications > ⚙️ (Settings).
2. Check that the on/off toggle is set to on (green).
3. Make a comment or like a post of yours, from another account.
4. Note that you get a push notification, and a WordPress.com notification - under the bell icon in the app.
5. Back in Notifications > ⚙️ (Settings), set the on/off toggle to off (grey). Note the displayed description of this setting.
6. Make a comment or like a post of yours, from another account.
7. Note that you still get a WordPress.com notification - under the bell icon in the app.
8. Note that you do not get a push notification.

This behavior is quite confusing. Turning the setting “off” doesn’t stop WordPress.com notifications from appearing in the Notifications tab, but it stops the user from accessing settings related to those WordPress.com notifications.

We need to differentiate more clearly between Push Notifications and WordPress.com Notifications.
Ideally, settings for push notifications would not live here, but in Me > App Settings. And settings for push notifications should in no way effect WordPress.com notifications.

Tested on Samsung Galaxy S21, Android 12, WPAndroid 21.0-rc-3

Found during usability exploration: pdcxQM-1ff-p2

[antonis]

Hey @osullivanchris 👋
I know that we are not focusing on the notification settings in our current work but I was wondering if you have feedback on this old issue.
Do you think a change in the copy would help to make the distinction between "WordPress.com Notifications" and "Push Notifications" more obvious? 🙇

[osullivanchris]

@antonis hey thanks for the ping.

• Looking across iOS and Android, they both differentiate between Push Notifications and WordPress/com notifications once you drill into a specific site.
• Only Android has this top level switch across all sites. It feels like this was added as a sort of safety hatch for users that immediately wand to disable push notifications without going into each site, do you think thats a good guess?
• I think the switch needs to be more specifically labelled to say that it is a master switch to allow push notifications for any site. Perhaps we could put it in a box with space for title and subtitle.
• The title of the list could also indicate that its about managing notifications across multiple channels
• a sketch of that is below
• One alternative..could we rely on the device settings for this? Usually this is done at the phone settings level I feel. Maybe we could link out there, if needed, rather than having our own switch for this.

[antonis]

Only Android has this top level switch across all sites. It feels like this was added as a sort of safety hatch for users that immediately wand to disable push notifications without going into each site, do you think thats a good guess?

This sounds like a good guess @osullivanchris. Looking at the history of this I found that it was introduced 7 years ago and the main reasoning was the following:

Having a global/master notification switch at the app level will allow us to track when users disable notifications and rethink our notification behavior. If notifications are disabled at the system level, we can't track that on devices prior to API 19 and the app currently supports devices back to API 16.
ref: #6625 (comment)

Currently we support devices with api 24 and maybe we can rethink this decision.

I think the switch needs to be more specifically labelled to say that it is a master switch to allow push notifications for any site. Perhaps we could put it in a box with space for title and subtitle.

This sounds like a good idea and would make thinks more clear imo 👍

One alternative..could we rely on the device settings for this? Usually this is done at the phone settings level I feel. Maybe we could link out there, if needed, rather than having our own switch for this.

If we decide to rethink the global switch this sounds like a good option to me 👍

[dangermattic]

Thanks for reporting! 👍