As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to disable and customise particular notification categories at the device level on Android.
For a little bit of added context, this feature request regards Android’s Notification Channels feature and how it is currently implemented fairly poorly into the Roblox mobile app.
To note, while users can toggle different notification types via the in-app settings page; this acts at the account-level and doesn’t follow the common theme on Android of using (or at least supporting) ‘notification channels’. Power-users such as myself may prefer to use the standardised ‘notification categories’ settings which are not only just applied at the device level but also use the same config UI across all apps (as it is implemented by the settings app). This feature also allows users to customise how particular notification categories are displayed as notifications. It would be ideal if Roblox could support this feature in a more ‘official’ way than as of currently.
For anyone who may not be aware; on Android, as long as the app has set it up correctly, users can disable or customise particular categories of notifications for each app at the device-level via the in-built settings app; a great example of an app which makes great use of this feature is Uber; this is how the Uber app has implemented their channels:
As you can see in the screenshot, I have great granularity over the notifications I am opted into. This is also the same UI regardless of which app I’m managing the notifications for, so I don’t need to learn to navigate the app itself before changing my notification preferences.
So, let’s take a look at the current notification categories for the Roblox Android app:
Ouch! What is a ‘default importance notification’, and how is it different to a ‘general notification’? Why do these sound like internal names for categories that are somehow in production?
As we can see in the example above, the current naming scheme for notification channels on Android is certainly not ideal (only ‘Call Notifications’ is clear in-purpose). Not only are they very vague and non-descriptive as to what they represent but it also appears that multiple different types of notifications are being grouped under one category, making it extra difficult to disable just one type of notification.
Now, to answer the burning question:
We have notification settings inside the app, though, right?
Yes, there are notification preferences in the in-app settings; however, these are applied at the account level across every device. I do understand that Roblox could simply make those settings (or add new settings which are) device-specific to solve that particular problem, though. However, another feature that notification channels provide is the ability to have customisation settings for certain notification channels, such as making a particular notification silent, changing the notification sound or showing the notification content on the lock-screen; this is something we cannot currently make use-of to the fullest potential due to the vague and generalised nature of the notification channels.
It is also worth keeping in mind that some previews of older Android phones (including the one in the documentation linked above) show that by holding down on the notification, it gives the option to disable that particular notification category. This means that by Roblox not expanding the notification categories to be more notification-specific, some users on certain devices may inadvertently disable an important notification stream believing that the channels have been set up with each notification type having their own category (in which it seems to not be the case); depending on how their phone’s UI communicates it to them.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I would be better able to control my notification settings at the device level on my Android phone. It would also give me greater freedom to edit customisation settings attached to particular types of notifications.