Foreground notifications on Android

[jkuek]

Hi,

My app is receiving push notifications successfully on both iOS and Android. However there is a difference in behaviour between the 2 operating systems when the app is in the foreground.

For both systems, when the app is closed or in the background, there is an onscreen notification which then shows in the system bar/Notification Center. On iOS, when the app is in the foreground, the behaviour is the same.

But on Android, there is no on-screen popup or indication to the user. I get the NotificationReceived event, but nothing shows on screen.

How can I make Android behave in the same way regardless of whether the app is in focus?

[thomasgalliker]

Thanks for this feedback, @jkuek. The original idea was to not display the OS popup while the apps run in foreground (unless you send high priority notifications). I‘ll check what‘s wrong in the iOS part of the library.

[jkuek]

Well, actually I want the notifications to be displayed when the app is in the foreground on Android and iOS.

I believe I am sending only high priority notifications - would you expect Android to display in the foreground if that is the case?

[thomasgalliker]

Yes, if you add a priority: high to the data portion of your notification message, the notification popup should be display when the Android app runs in foreground. However - there are cases which can avoid this. I guess the notification channels play a role here.

[jkuek]

Here's a redacted version of the notification received in my NotificationReceived handler when the app is in the foreground:

Data=[{google.delivered_priority=high},{google.sent_time=1749168732250},{google.ttl=2419200},{google.original_priority=high},{gcm.notification.e=1},{eventId=32935962},{gcm.notification.title=Notification},{google.product_id=111881503},{from=275823460679},{google.message_id=0:1749168732260420%dd956afcdd956afc},{gcm.notification.body=Test message},{google.c.a.e=1},{google.c.sender.id=275823460679},{collapse_key=com.redacted.mobile},{location={"Timestamp":1749168728,"DateTime":"2025-06-06T00:12:08Z","Longitude":0,"Latitude":0,"Altitude":0,"Accuracy":17.0,"Course":null,"Speed":null}}]

the priority is high, but there is no popup. What am I doing wrong?

[thomasgalliker]

Thanks for the extracted data. I asked chatgpt to convert it back to the FCM HTTP v1 data structure and it would look like this:!

{
  "message": {
    "notification": {
      "title": "Notification",
      "body": "Test message"
    },
    "token": "{{fcm_token}}",
    "data": {
      "eventId": "32935962",
      "product_id": "111881503",
      "location": "{\"Timestamp\":1749168728,\"DateTime\":\"2025-06-06T00:12:08Z\",\"Longitude\":0,\"Latitude\":0,\"Altitude\":0,\"Accuracy\":17.0,\"Course\":null,\"Speed\":null}",
      "priority": "high"
    },
    "android": {
      "collapse_key": "com.redacted.mobile",
      "priority": "HIGH",
      "ttl": "2419200s"
    }
  }
}

When I send this message to the sample app in this repository, I receive following warning in the log:
Warning: Notification channel 'default_channel_id' has importance 'Default' which is lower than notification importance 'High'

This warning indicates that the configured notification channel (default_channel_id) has a configured importance of 'Default' which is not high enough to display the incoming notification with importance 'High' as a notification popup. This is all good from my point of view.

The question is, why is NotificationReceived event not fired. The answer is: NotificationBuilder.ShouldHandleNotificationReceived makes the decision if the incoming notification needs to be displayed as a notification popup or sent to NotificationReceived event. In this case, ShouldHandleNotificationReceived returns true which means the popup should be displayed. Since the configured notification channel has an importance of 'Default', no popup is shown.

It's actually all fine. The question is, does this scenario need an improvement?

• Should we extend ShouldHandleNotificationReceived with an additional check, if the configured notification channel does not have enough importance to display popups?
• Should we set the notification importance of the default notification channel to "high"?

[thomasgalliker]

Issue #132 with PR #131 is the attempt to solve the issue we discuss here. Maybe we can switch to the issue for further discussions, okay?