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Bring back permanent notifications 🗣️📢

Another day, another feature taken away by Google (seriously, what have they been up to lately?).

As you're all well aware by now, Android 14 made "permanent" notifications dismissible now, breaking many apps along the way – including our dear Tasker, most notably. I've been missing the old notification's functionality ever since the update but apparently there's a rather easy fix for this,  at least in theory.

We can somewhat bring back most of the old functionality back by automatically showing any permanent Tasker notifications as soon as they're dismissed. This is probably easier said than done as every Tasker notification marked as permanent would have to be stored somewhere more central and accessible than the tasks from which they were created. But, although I have no expertise on this, I suppose this still shouldn't be too difficult.

I was made aware of this possibility after reading through Shubham Mourya's "Notes" app changelog concerning Android 14. His app is much simpler, therefore the fix was likely very easy to implement, but I believe it's primitive enough of a fix for it to easily work in Tasker too.

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Hi! Does this help?

https://www.reddit.com/r/tasker/comments/18ibkpt/dev_autonotification_bring_back_persistent/

It's a more wide approach that should help make any app's persistent notifications come back after being dismissed.

Thanks!

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DH

Thanks for the reply, I appreciate the effort to bring back non dismissible notifications to ALL apps, not just Tasker. And the fix does appear to do what it is intended to do, for the most part, so it is a nice option to have for any non-Tasker notifications. However, it falls a bit short of what I had in mind for Tasker specifically. Here's why:

The issue with this catch-all approach is that it doesn't actually reinstate the same notification, instead it makes a new one belonging to Auto Notification. This, as a result, adds complexity, creates some issues and loses some functionality (or rather fails to gain the intended functionality, I guess?).

First off, Tasker notifications with more than one quick action aren't properly cloned by Auto Notification, as no matter which cloned quick action is used, they all map to only one of the original notification's quick actions – the first one, to be precise (although I assume this is probably just an oversight and no major concern technically speaking).

Secondly, and more importantly, updating the content of a permanent Tasker notification by overwriting/ reinstating it via a Tasker notification doesn't always affect cloned notifications. I've done some testing and I see that you've tried to account for this. Unfortunately, I have some difficulties singling out the differences in my testing, so I can't tell you when or why this doesn't work. I could provide a protocol if you'd like, but you might want to hear me out on the next issues first.

Thirdly, there's a quite a bit of added complexity needed to account for cloned notifications. Permanent notifications can no longer be cancelled via Tasker's "Notify Cancel" and need to be cancelled via Auto Notification. Which means that any preexisting tasks need to be edited to account for this. Additionally, any alterations to the android notification category settings of an original notification need to be manually copied for the cloned notification's android notification category settings.

Lastly, and most importantly, reinstating a permanent notification (to update it's contents, for example), after it was previously dismissed and cloned by Auto Notification, will lead to a doubling of the notification. In cases where the permanent notification is updated/ overwritten frequently, a single notification could be cloned and multiplied over and over again, leading to an onslaught of notifications. Granted, one would have to dismiss the original notification a bunch of times for this to happen, which goes against the intent, but this shouldn't happen regardless as this is supposed to be a fix for accidentally or otherwise dismissed permanent notifications.

I can already imagine some user-based workarounds for some of these issues, but not all of them. Nonetheless, it's definitely quite cumbersome. Also, and I think this is important, I believe it would be the right thing to do to implement any solutions to this in Tasker itself anyway, as opposed to doing it in AutoNotification (at least when it comes to Tasker's own permanent notifications. Definitely keep the current fix for all other apps though, as an added incentive to purchase AutoNotification!). I'm not affected by this since I've already purchased AutoNotification but I think one shouldn't have to in order to gain this functionality when you only use Tasker's notifications. This one's just my personal opinion though, it's up to you to decide in the end since it's not Tasker's fault permanent notifications behave this way now – Tasker's permanent notifications still do exactly what they're intended do according to Android, after all.

If there's a way to add some sort of "permanent notifications" pool/ bin/ storage for Tasker to dump and (automatically) call it's own permanent notifications from whenever they're dismissed, I believe this would be ideal. This might fundamentally change how tasker notification work, I don't actually know (at all), but that's just my suggestion as a layman. 

Anyway, I think this about covers everything I have to say on this so far.

Thanks for always listening to us!

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Thanks for the in-depth comments! Appreciate it! :)

Yes, I do realize that it would be better to do it within Tasker itself so you don't have those limitations, but as you mentioned, it would probably require a lot of work to get it done. I'll consider it for future updates. Thanks!

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