Animated Notification Feedback

I will let you know if I learn something in particular.

For now, I do have some ideas I’d like to present.

I know @WyzeMatt (Head of Subscription Growth) is pretty swamped at the moment, but I am going to tag him to bring this to his attention since it is still related to his subscriptions and is a BIG deal to some of us that use notification parsing apps (I use MacroDroid, Buzzkill, and Tasker for different notification purposes) and maybe see if he can reach out to the teams in charge of this and ask them what variables they are putting the notification text under now that is making it hard for us to parse their notification text now. They should theoretically still keep it under Title, subtext or whatever the technical field terms are. Maybe he can look into this and let us know how they changed the text fields in the notifications or if they can fix it back to be standard text fields again.

I’ve been researching on what may be the cause here and these are some of the top contending hypotheses:

  • They could have encoded the text within the GIF itself as metadata. This would make it visually present but inaccessible to parsers looking for plain text. Maybe they just did this by accident?!?!
  • They could be using a custom notification layout that places the text in a non-standard way that parsers can’t recognize. And again, I would hope this is on accident or in ignorance of the fallout it causes, rather than something required in order to use an animated GIF.
  • Maybe instead of including the text directly in the notification, they could be using some kind of background service to fetch the GIF and text, which would make it harder for parsers to capture the text reliably.
  • They could have created a new notification channel for these animated notification with different properties (which the parsers aren’t programmed to recognize).

Apparently there are ways we can figure this out though! Unfortunately I don’t think I can help though, since I am not getting the animated notifications at all for some reason, so it’s not affecting me. But if you are willing…you could try to capture the

I’m told there are ways we could figure it out with either a special app or using adb to capture notification data when it arrives to see the raw notification data including all its fields and content. adb can be complicated, but if you are willing to try to use an app like “Notification History Log” in Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ikvaesolutions.notificationhistorylog , I am told that it and some others will allow you to see the RAW data of any notification in it’s “Advanced History” which is designed to expose the underlying notification data including the raw JSON payload. You may have to alter the settings to something like Advanced Logging or Verbose Mode or Developer Options. But if we can get that working, it should also allow you to copy the raw data for analysis and potentially post it here so I, and others can possibly help you figure it out (please make sure it doesn’t include any recognizable personal information before you post it, just in case…I don’t think it would, but thought I’d suggest you quickly review it anyway…worst case scenario, you are also free to DM me [after deleting anything obviously private] to limit public exposure, but I don’t think it should be much different from a screenshot of the notification, so it should be fine). There are apparently lots of other apps that should be able to do this too, that is just one I saw recommended. Looks like there is an open source app called Notification Log that is on the play store and F-Droid that should also be able to do it, as well as several others.

Again, it would be nice if Wyze fixes the breakage themselves to use standardized fields, etc like everyone should. And Hopefull Matt sees this and has time to look into it (publicly or in backchannels), but I suggest we not pin all our hopes on Wyze resolving it, and take steps to see if we can figure it out.

Again, I don’t think I can help test with this at the moment though because my notifications haven’t changed yet for some reason. But if I start getting the animated notifications then I will certainly start helping test a fix with you.

Wish I could offer more than the above hypotheses and suggestions, but I hope it is still helpful.

Edit: Looks like we found another victim:

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