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Notifications - the implementation is not ideal; I can only poll every 15 minutes, but I've been getting a steady stream of LFGSS notifications on my phone for the last few weeks now and it's really fun. One day I want to do push notifications, but that would require some changes on the back end.
Does that mean more background battery use (app waking up, checking, finding no updates, going back to sleep)? If I turn off all notifications in the app does it stop polling?
jellybaby-
Good question.
It does indeed use more power than push notifications, but the difference should be negligible. My understanding is that Android will batch these events up from all apps, and run them all at the same time.
I've also noticed, on my phone at least, it doesn't bother running the scheduled task at night, and I suddenly get a flurry of notifications a few seconds after I pick up my phone for the first time in the morning. So evidently Android is very aggressively managing when the scheduled tasks actually run.
You can also go into settings have a look at which apps are using the battery, and how much time they spend running in the background. I just looked now, and I'm pleased to see the app is pretty easy on the battery and has clocked "less than a min" of background task time, over the last four hours.
Turning off all notifications does not disable the polling - only logging out does that. And that's a very good point you raise. I'll add it to the list of things to do.
cyclotron3k
I mentioned this in the Android thread, but it should probably have its own thread, so here it is.
I just published my first Android app: it's a client for LFGSS no less, and it goes by the imaginative name of LFGSS Mobile.
The main features are:
Despite all that, there's still a lot of work to do: Events still need a lot of work, the login experience could be better, etc, etc.
Login is currently achieved by loading LFGSS in a webview. You'll probably have to type your email address in and use the "send me a code" method because as of 2021, Google disallowed their SSO endpoints being loaded in webviews. There's a neater, more native way of doing login, but I'd need help from bossman on that.
It's also open source and available on GitHub, so anyone can build it, extend it, fork it, etc. It's written in Flutter, which is a cross-platform app development framework which uses the Dart language. So although I've only released an Android version, it shouldn't be too much effort to release an iOS version. Extending it to be a universal Microcosm client is also a possibility.