Play a distinct Zulip notification sound, on iOS

[jackrzhang]

This is a follow up to zulip/zulip#10761 and #2651.

These articles from Apple's developer documentation seem to be relevant.

(@zulipbot add "area: notifications" "area: iOS")
(@zulipbot claim)

[borisyankov]

I would certainly not want this sound played with the notifications.
While I reluctantly added it while the app is active, it is barely audible at mid-volume levels (and maybe even high phone-level sounds) and is easy to mistake with any thumping sound.

PS. When discussed people generally agreed we want something better but we didn't do anything about it... yet.

[jackrzhang]

I would certainly not want this sound played with the notifications.

For reference, "this sound" is referring to the audio from any file currently named zulip.mp3 in either zulip/zulip or zulip/zulip-mobile; they're all the same sound.

I wouldn't mind using a more noticeable or distinct sound! @borisyankov Would you have the links for past discussions on this?

[borisyankov]

I found some short discussion with Tim on PM more than a year ago 😄

[timabbott]

The thumping/drumbeat-like sound we use in the webapp was chosen for the web use case. We've received praise from some people for that sound not being annoying/disruptive.

I don't think we should necessarily copy that as the only sound option for mobile, where (A) thumping sounds are more likely to be part of the environment and (B) there's a lot of variability in how far the device is from the person who needs to hear it.

(Reasonable options include having that sound be one among several options we make available on mobile; there's been some work on having options for the sound on web, but I think they're probably semi-independent features in any case, since I can certainly imagine myself wanting different sounds for the two contexts)

[stuntsman]

I'd like to bring this feature to your attention.

IOS uses the default tri-tone sound for every single app that doesn't have a custom sound (shame on Apple), which makes it impossible to distinguish the notifications without looking at the phone.

I'd suggest including 5-10 sound effects in the app to choose from. I'd be happy to help even with a research or by creating license free notification sounds.

[baxterdmutt]

This should be an important upgrade. As it stands the Zulip notification just blends in with every other “bing” the iPhone makes. I ignore most because they are meaningless.

[chrisbobbe]

This should be an important upgrade. As it stands the Zulip notification just blends in with every other “bing” the iPhone makes. I ignore most because they are meaningless.

Thanks for the ping! Once #4115 is fixed (#4163 is open for that), it'll be easier to address the various issues with iOS notifications. I'll mark this issue as "blocked" on that work, just so its status is clear. I'm sorry I don't have a better status update right now, but I'll ping Greg on #4163 to see if we might be able to land that soon.

[gnprice]

#4163 is merged!

[gnprice]

Retitled this issue for the same reason as its Android twin: #3150 (comment)

[gnprice]

The Android side of this, #3150, is now complete, with #5221 merged. In particular that means we now have a distinct Zulip "chime" sound that's good for a mobile notification.

For the iOS side, it'll work a bit differently because the notification is described by the server, and the system interprets that description without involving any of our client-side code. The way the server specifies the sound is documented here:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/setting_up_a_remote_notification_server/generating_a_remote_notification#2990112

The actual sound file needs to exist in the app on the device. So one step is:

• Start including the sound file in the iOS app. The copy used in the Android app is android/app/src/main/res/raw/chime3.m4a.

Then the server needs to start including that sound's name in the notification payloads. That's straightforward to do, except… we need things to continue to work for existing installs of the app that don't have the new sound. I don't see in the documentation what happens if the notification specifies a sound that doesn't exist.

• Hopefully in that case iOS falls back to the default sound. Let's test this empirically. If so, then we can just start unconditionally sending the name of the new sound.
• If not, we'll need some kind of mechanism for the app to tell the server what sound to use. That would start with a chat discussion in #api design to figure out the protocol.

For developing this change, some key workflow information is in docs/howto/push-notifications.md: here and here.

[phanohanover]

Any progress on this?
I have an iphone 12 mini which just got updated to ios 17.
There is no way to specify a particular sound for Zulip notifications.
Moreover, the latest IOS has a notification sound that cannot be changed and it is too quiet for me.
I like the Klaxon which is LOUD and clear but cannot assign it to Zulip notifications.

I use this for alerts and monitoring of our servers... Don't want to miss an alert!
Thumbs up for Zulip.