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Notifications are how Android apps get your attention. Whether someone is trying to reach you or an event requires your attention, notifications can pop up on your screen and make your phone vibrate, prompting you to check your phone. Whether you activate notification sounds or prefer a vibration, notifications avoid constantly checking your screen and let you know when you should do so.
This Google Messages bug is making it harder to reply on Android
If your notifications are missing the Reply option, you aren’t alone
If you use Google Messages as a primary form of communication, you might rely on notifications from the app on your Android device to keep up with conversations. Pop-up notifications give you a few action options, such as snoozing and marking messages as read. They also typically allow you to tap “Reply” and write a quick response, but a new bug seems to be preventing this feature from functioning correctly.
According to a report yesterday by Bloomberg, some Android apps may be using silent push notifications to track if and when you uninstall them, which is alleged to be a violation of both Apple and Google's policies. Ostensibly this is being done to target such users with advertisements designed to win the back, although the tracking providers claim this functionality is designed to gauge response to app updates and changes.
If you use Instagram's mobile web app, then you've likely been waiting patiently for the addition of notifications since it launched in the first half of 2017. That wait is finally over. Now, Instagram users who log in from Chome can turn on notifications for when they get new followers, likes, or comments. The change also applies to Instagram Lite, which is still in testing, and more or less a wrapper of the mobile site.
Several major websites have offered push notifications with Chrome (and other supported browsers) for some time, including sites like Facebook and eBay. Today Google+ is now supporting this feature, enabling users to receive notifications even when the site is not open.
This month's update to Chrome is a little more developer-centric than usual. We're accustomed to seeing small visual tweaks and a couple of other new capabilities here and there –and there is a fix of that nature– but this time, it's all about the APIs. Chrome Beta v44 adds a few new features for notifications and install banners, adds a new way to define names for object literals in Javascript, and makes a few breaking changes to the Push API.
Twitter can be intimidating to new users. The same can be said for experienced users. A timeline is only as good as the content you follow, and even then, you may miss the good bits over the course of a day unless you commit to scrolling through every single tweet.
Plume For Twitter 5.4 Update Adds Push Notifications, Unread Counts, And A Few Other Tweaks
Plume For Twitter 5.4 Update Adds Push Notifications, Unread Counts, And A Few Other Tweaks
Flashier Twitter apps have come and gone, but I'm still pretty enamored with Plume. One reason is that the developer (LevelUp, of Beautiful Widgets fame) is constantly rolling out new features, and today's update adds a doozie: push notifications. You should get notifications for new tweets, replies, mentions, and messages more or less instantly, and the widget and main feed can now use a "Live Stream" mode.
Lets face it, email just isn't sexy. The Gmail app has done a lot to pretty things up, adding in fancy swiping gestures and associating pictures with each contact, but the experience is still somewhat clunky. There are alternatives, such as the stock Android app (pretty basic), K-9 Mail (the kitchen-sink approach) and Dextr (innovative, but very limited) - but all have their drawbacks. Evomail is the latest kid on the block, and it hopes to make managing email a task you actually want to do.
Despite its name, Pushover is no, well, pushover. This easy-to-use push notification service allows web services, scripts, and a bunch of other apps to send alerts to your mobile device, and when combined with a site like IFTTT, it can bend the internet to your will. Now, a year and a half after the app's debut, the Pushover team has updated the app to version 2.0, giving the app a new look and filling it up with new functionality.
Google has made a small change to the Google Calendar API that nonetheless could make a huge difference for developers and users. The Calendar API now supports push notifications - alerts sent directly to devices and apps instead of waiting for a client-side sync, a la Gmail - for updates that are practically instantaneous. The official app has had this for a while, but now third-party developers have access to this functionality, meaning that push notifications for subscribed Google Calendars can be sent to any app that supports the general Gcal API.
While the GetJar Appstore has its advantages, like GetJar Gold for example, it has been lacking one important feature that both the Android Market and Amazon Appstore have: push notification for app updates. In the past, when you downloaded an app from GetJar, the only way of knowing if the app had been updated was by going directly to that apps listing in GetJar.
Finally, after many months of waiting, the official Twitter client for Android has received an update that adds some long-awaited functionality, like push notifications and the ability to seamlessly transition between multiple accounts.