Is a more granular approach to notifications on the roadmap?
I finally got my TTGO shipment today, and setting everything up went super smooth. Awesome!
One thing I’m noticing is that it would be helpful to have control over individual notifications. Currently, this is what I’m seeing:
If I escalate that notification level, so as not to miss message notifications, I also get bombarded by this unrelated notification:
This is the inReach app I’m trying to phase out (eventually). Having separate notifications for new messages makes my brain happy. Since the TTGO isn’t always in sight, basic battery warnings might be helpful too.
I doubt I’m the first to think if this, but my forum searches didn’t turn up anything obviously related.
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I’m currently working on the app and the only push notification I thought about was for received messages. Meshtastic is a different way of communication and the smartphone is just a small computing terminal with a big screen, with connectivity functions (considering Meshtastic use cases) disabled or out of range.
Yes, inReach (Earthmate app) is the same concept as Meshtastic, but it uses a satellite uplink rather than LoRa. That app executes some things poorly, but it has been in production for 8+ years. It is a mature project which has already gone through many of the same design/feature challenges, and there are some things that we could learn from.
The hardware is much more polished, but it is the same model of a transmitter in one unit which connects to the phone via Bluetooth.
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Perhaps there are other useful notification ideas, but I also think it’s wise to keep it simple. It would be helpful to have a notification if the battery drops below a certain percentage.
That is a helpful screen, but I think it will be common for people not to view it often. Having a warning notification when the battery level drops below 20% (or some other level) could prevent big problems for users.
I use the inReach in similar patterns to the standard Meshtastic group hiking use-case. It is very easy to get in a pattern of expecting your battery to be good, but then run out at a bad time. This may be counter-intuitive because of the long battery life. I actually forget to charge my InReach more often than my phone exactly because the battery is often good for months. So I get in the habit of not needing to charge it.
Having the message notification separated from the Meshtastic system notifications would be great.
Most currently-supported devices have an in-built screen to show diagnostic data like battery or signal strength. Reliably having those info on the smartphone too would require to wake-up the CPU and send telemetry data frequently enough.
Probably reducing update frequency can be a good compromise between data reliability and low power constraints.
