Multiple reminder notifications are confusing

[barbeau]

Summary:

This issue is based on user feedback on the implementation in #937.

In #937, we modified TripService to always run in the foreground. The primary reason for this is that on Android 8.0 Oreo and higher you can no longer run a service in the background after receiving a BOOT_COMPLETED Intent (i.e., on device reboot) - if you do, you'll get an IllegalStateException. A secondary reason for running the service in the foreground is that anecdotally this results in better reliability of services executing immediately - although in our testing for TripService it seemed to execute immediately even when running in the background.

However, to run a service in the foreground you have to provide a notification to a user. And, if we always run TripService in the foreground, this results in duplicate notifications shown to the user when they get a reminder, like this:

I've gotten feedback that this is confusing, and I'd like to try and improve the user experience surrounding this.

One possible implementation is that we run the TripService in the foreground for all Intents EXCEPT for our TripService.ACTION_NOTIFY intent. This would remove the need for the 2nd icon when the user is actually looking at the notifications (for the other executions of TripService for scheduling and polling the server the notification would still appear, but would disappear so quickly most users would never notice it). This would fix the UX issue with reminder notifications and hopefully still keep reliability high by running the service in the foreground for the task of scheduling alarms and polling the server.

Steps to reproduce:

Set a reminder on current master branch

Expected behavior:

Give me one notification for my reminder

Observed behavior:

Two notifications are shown, one generic notification being related to running the service in the foreground

Device and Android version:

Samsung Galaxy S8+ with Android 8.0

[barbeau]

Actually, looking at TripService.notifyTrip() closer, we currently aren't requesting that the service run in the foreground right now when showing the user the notification:

    public static void notifyTrip(Context context, Uri alertUri, String notifyTitle, String notifyText) {
        final Intent intent = new Intent(context, TripService.class);
        intent.setAction(ACTION_NOTIFY);
        intent.setData(alertUri);
        intent.putExtra(NOTIFY_TEXT, notifyText);
        intent.putExtra(NOTIFY_TITLE, notifyTitle);
        context.startService(intent);
    }

If we were requesting it start in the foreground it would be:

        ...
        context.startForegroundService(intent);