Local Notifications in .NET MAUI Essentials

[jfversluis]

There was a proposal here in Xamarin.Essentials for local notifications. After it was initially turned down because it might be too specific to UI, there were some people who made a case for it and an implementation was started to move the discussion forward.

Proposed API would look something like:

class LocalNotifications {
  Task CancelAll();
  Task Cancel(int id);
  Task Send(LocalNotification notification);
  Task<IEnumerable<LocalNotification>> GetNotificationsAsync();
}

class LocalNotification {
  int Id { get; set; }
  string Title { get; set; }
  string Message { get; set; }
  IDictionary<string, string> Metadata { get; set; }
}

A plugin that already provides this and might act as inspiration: https://github.com/thudugala/Plugin.LocalNotification

What do people think? Should we add this to Essentials?

[aritchie]

This spec was fine for simple usage when I proposed it, but there are a lot of things feature wise that will be missing that many will find they need almost immediately after starting to use local notifications.

• Scheduled Notifications - this is almost a show stopper for local notifications. It also doesn't come out of the box with Android
• Notification Actions/Replies - On Android, you really have to do this in local notifications
• Android has a ton of notifications customizations that are not "cross platform". iOS has started to have their own customizations as well.
• Clicks Events - if the user taps on the notification, this event needs to be caught early in the app lifecycle to navigate properly

Other things to consider

• You need some form of more data store or serialization mechanism to be able to store the notifications for android. Essentials doesn't currently have anything out of the box for this.
• Long Term - Location Based Notifications - out of box for iOS, not Android. You may be able to get around this by telling customers to use geofencing which essentials also doesn't offer

[carlfranklin]

I'd really like to use a SignalR message to trigger a notification. Seems like a match made in heaven.

[BobbyCannon]

Exactly what I was searching for when I got here. I want to send a signalR message but have it notify on the Android mobile device.

[aritchie]

SignalR connections won't stay connected when your app goes to the background.

[BobbyCannon]

What about running "foreground service"? I'm working on a local notification plug in right now. Maybe I should focus on the foreground service first.

[aritchie]

If you only care about Android, a foreground service could pull this off. You could likely piggyback on the datasync foreground type, but Android updates may start cracking down on foreground services in the near future

[sander1095]

would really appreciate scheduled and cancellable notifications in this API. Granted, you have to mess about with the AlarmManager on Android but I think some extra features on this API would make it very useful.

[edgiardina]

This would be really cool. I would also like to pair this with iOS Background Fetch which I don't seem to see a lot of docs for MAUI on. My app has no push notifications powering it, instead we fetch and compare data periodically then local notify the user.

[gkarabin]

A low-feature, maintainable API would solve a number of simple use cases. I would think that there is room for something like the original proposal, a least common denominator. Once someone wants more differentiation they can look to investing in platform specifics.

That’s easy enough for me to write, since I’m not working on a contribution, but I think this is a case where the perfect is the enemy of the good enough, and this is a glaring hole.

[99067718]

This is a really good idea, I hope this will get added.

[janseris]

When will this be available?
Does MAUI support some notifications at the moment? (not from external online service)

[janseris]

You are right. What I am just trying to say that MAUI is heavily underinvested in terms of developers and it's not changing and it looks unmantainable when you see the issues (+more and more to come). And one other thing is the quality of the already released MAUI technology and inconsistence with documentation. But that is probably the same cause - too few developers.
When we try to use any part of MAUI, we immediately are finding bugs, inconsistences with documentation (mostly that parts claimed to be working aren't working) and reporting loads of bugs with little perspective to be fixed (most of them haven't been fully fixed (most have been partially) since 6 months ago when we started with MAUI).
Using such technology as a client is very frustrating and that is why I am actively trying my best to let the team know and change because that's all I can do and hope for.

When you compare to other C# technologies by Microsoft, this is a rare failure because other products are supported and developed very well (well to post complete info, I read some unfortunate info about WPF being now supported by an outsourced team and not doing a quality work because they are lost in the technology).

[liebki]

For my things, I can say its doing its job. I can't talk about professional company stuff tho. I think with enough manpower and will, MAUI will be a fantastic thing.

[aritchie]

Wow... this thread exploded. The level of entitlement that you can demand Microsoft do this is in full epic proportion as well.

A few reasons why Microsoft does not HAVE to implement this:

1. MAUI = Microsoft Application USER INTERFACE. Notifications are not a render UI element. They are a function of the platform
2. React Native & Flutter don't offer notifications out of the box. It's from their corresponding ecosystems.
3. For simple notifications, you can implement this yourself in a few lines of code.
4. Essentials is basically bonus icing that isn't offered in many other xplat solutions or at least in the capacity that Essentials offers.
5. Learn to be thankful for what you do get for free in MAUI. There's always flutter, react native, ionic if you think that will supply you better. Pick your poison.

The under resourcing of the MAUI team in a github enhancement request, is ultimately noise and takes away from the justification for the feature. It also takes the actual team MORE TIME to shovel through this crap. This isn't the place for these types of comments.

For those looking for this particular feature. The ecosystem has some great options. I have an alpha version of Shiny.NET (https://github.com/shinyorg/shiny) that is compatible with .NET MAUI that offers many functions not available in MAUI Essentials including local & push notifications.

[liebki]

Wow... this thread exploded. The level of entitlement that you can demand Microsoft do this is in full epic proportion as well.

A few reasons why Microsoft does not HAVE to implement this:

1. MAUI = Microsoft Application USER INTERFACE. Notifications are not a render UI element. They are a function of the platform

2. React Native & Flutter don't offer notifications out of the box. It's from their corresponding ecosystems.

3. For simple notifications, you can implement this yourself in a few lines of code.

4. Essentials is basically bonus icing that isn't offered in many other xplat solutions or at least in the capacity that Essentials offers.

5. Learn to be thankful for what you do get for free in MAUI. There's always flutter, react native, ionic if you think that will supply you better. Pick your poison.

The under resourcing of the MAUI team in a github enhancement request, is ultimately noise and takes away from the justification for the feature. It also takes the actual team MORE TIME to shovel through this crap. This isn't the place for these types of comments.

For those looking for this particular feature. The ecosystem has some great options. I have an alpha version of Shiny.NET (https://github.com/shinyorg/shiny) that is compatible with .NET MAUI that offers many functions not available in MAUI Essentials including local & push notifications.

Thank you for this

[janseris]

Wow... this thread exploded. The level of entitlement that you can demand Microsoft do this is in full epic proportion as well.

A few reasons why Microsoft does not HAVE to implement this:

1. MAUI = Microsoft Application USER INTERFACE.  Notifications are not a render UI element.  They are a function of the platform

2. React Native & Flutter don't offer notifications out of the box.  It's from their corresponding ecosystems.

3. For simple notifications, you can implement this yourself in a few lines of code.

4. Essentials is basically bonus icing that isn't offered in many other xplat solutions or at least in the capacity that Essentials offers.

5. Learn to be thankful for what you do get for free in MAUI.  There's always flutter, react native, ionic if you think that will supply you better.  Pick your poison.

The under resourcing of the MAUI team in a github enhancement request, is ultimately noise and takes away from the justification for the feature. It also takes the actual team MORE TIME to shovel through this crap. This isn't the place for these types of comments.

For those looking for this particular feature. The ecosystem has some great options. I have an alpha version of Shiny.NET (https://github.com/shinyorg/shiny) that is compatible with .NET MAUI that offers many functions not available in MAUI Essentials including local & push notifications.

Thank you for link, nice to hear about that. I will take a look.
P.S.: MAUI being UI-only is only partial truth.
MAUI contains also Maui.Graphics (since some of the last RCs) and Xamarin.Essentials (since Preview 11?).
These are more non-UI than UI. Can't say how much code they make but I think it might be even 50 % of MAUI.
They allow access to device capabilities. This is an important part of MAUI which doesn't work correctly.
I can replace UI by paid UI libraries from third party vendors but these internals cannot be replaced. Notifications would be part of these.
Remember when MAUI was released and almost no image manipulation from Maui.Graphics worked (half of the functions were throwing NotImplementedException and the other half threw about using a Disposed object) and the Windows implementation wasn't even a public class? That's what I am talking about.

3. For simple notifications, you can implement this yourself in a few lines of code.

If so, could you guide me a bit of a hint? I'd like to try but I have no idea where to start. I don't know any Android development.
MAUI is supposed to abstract programmer from the platform. That's why we started considering it and hoped that it would do having only experience in Windows desktop development.

[ComptonAlvaro]

I would like to see local notifications in the essentials, similar like the plugin you comment as inspiration.

One thing I would like to can do it is to handle acctions, for example, if I run a foreground service periodically as reminders, the user could tap a button in the notification to stop the reminder because he considerates as notified.