Context
As per the FCM documentation on Android Message Handling, push notifications will only be displayed if the App is backgrounded. It is not possible for a notification to appear in the System Tray while the App is foregrounded.
However! I have an app built with Capacitor. The app is currently on beta using the Internal Testing tool suite of the playstore. On it, when sending push notifications, I receive them through the onMessageReceived callback AND the System Tray even when the app is foregrounded.
According to the documentation, that shouldn’t be possible. So, I thought maybe (without being able to confirm):
- Did I read the FCM documentation wrong?
- The Internal Testing is preventing FCM from correctly detecting if an app is foregrounded (although I don’t think so, since
onMessageReceivedget triggered) - Something is wrong with Capacitor (I am using an old and unsupported version, so I wouldn’t be surprised of unintended behaviour)
- Something wrong about the FCM message format I’m sending (see below)?
An example of the FCM message package I’m sending using the firebase-admin SDK (latest version). This is a notification message with the optional data payload provided:
{
data: { // data },
notification: { title: "My title", body: 'My body' },
android: { notification: { priority: 'max', visibility: 'public' } },
apns: { payload: { aps: [Object] } },
tokens: // token
}
Some observations:
- On iOS (Capacitor being cross-platform), I get the same behaviour with a notification in the System Tray and the callback triggered
- On Android, notifications that appear when the app is foregrounded are not clickable
- When the app is backgrounded, I get notifications in the System Tray as expected. Those work as intended and are clickable (eg. they open the app and trigger the correct callbacks)
- I just updated from a very old
firebase-adminSDK (that was using the now-closed legacy APIs) to the latest version of the SDK. Before, I didn’t have this kind of issues.
My question (finally)
- Is this issue caused by the Internal Testing? If so, that would indicate to me that the live version will work as expected
- If not, did you ever encounter this issue? If so, did you fix it and how?
- If not, do you have an idea what could be the issue?
What I tried
- I’ve tried removing the
android.notification.priorityand.visibilityprops, but I get the same issue. - All the research I’ve done point to topics and posts discussing if it was possible to send a notification to the System Tray while the app is foregrounded. While I am in that situation, but want to get out of it (truly ironic).
2
If you need to get onMessageReceived when the app is in foreground and background, You should send notification object as null and use data object for sending data as follows
{
data: { title: "My title", body: 'My body' },
notification: null,
android: { notification: { priority: 'max', visibility: 'public' } },
apns: { payload: { aps: [Object] } },
tokens: // token
}
3