Channel human readable title extraneous notification

Android 1.17.1 (390)
Pixel 3 w/ Android 10

There is this extraneous notification dot that doesn’t seem to do anything. It appears whenever I use the app. This is the only app of mine that creates this white dot notification. What is this and is it possible to have it disabled for everyone by default? Are there any consequences to disabling this notification?

Just opening the app causes it? I think all my notification settings are the same as yours and I’m not getting it. But I’m on Android 9, so maybe that’s it?

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@jwidness: Just opening the app causes it?

Yep!

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It shows up for me as well.

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What Android version are you running?

Android 9.

Appears and then disappears for me.


Hard to catch, but by changing from My Observations to Explore I could get the circle to reappear. I think this is not a notification coming from iNaturalist but rather from Android. I get this circle also when I close apps and return to the Android “desktop” - in that case triggered by the weather app. I was able to “trap” the circle long enough to pick up the Android message, and the message is the same that the weather app generates, a notification that the app is running.

My sense is that this either related to Android’s reporting of apps using power or part of some chunk of code reporting apps working in the background. Thus far only my weather app and iNaturalist appear to generate the icon and the icon goes away after a few moments.
iNaturalist version:

Android version details:

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i think “notification dot” has a special technical meaning. it’s the dot (badge) that will show up on the upper-right corner of an app icon when that app has a new notification. see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGIw4MIJn5o. for example, if iNaturalist developers added a feature in the app to notify you of new iNaturalist activity (new IDs, comments, etc.), then they could display a little notification dot on the app icon to let you know that there’s new stuff for you to look at.

(i don’t think the app is actually displaying “notification dots”.)

the thing you’re seeing in the notification bar is just a “notification”, i think. it’s round like a dot probably because your app icons are set up to be circles. i’ve set up my app icons to be rounded squares. so my notification is a rounded square.

the current “Channel human readable title” notification appears to be a notification to let you know when the app is interacting with the iNaturalist API. i think “Channel human readable title” is a stock description text for a “notification channel”, and it should probably be changed by the developers to something more meaningful like “API interaction notifications”.

you can probably turn it off without any consequences. the developers could probably turn it off by default, but personally, i like to see the notification just as an indicator that the app is doing something.

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yeah, this is obscure enough a thing that it shouldn’t be turned on by default. all apps are doing something when you open them and there doesn’t need to be a notification for normal background actions while using the app.

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I don’t think that this has ever been a problem to me, maybe because the app that I use is not android but samsung…
Maybe the notification was just a glitch that somehow ended up in the app and wasn’t noticed

We’ll take a look at this.

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I just upgraded to Android 10 and now I’m seeing it too…

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It’s a workaround to allow the app to sync in the background. Perhaps it can be hidden in some circumstances.

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From what I’m told, it may not be simple to hide the dot when the iNaturalist app is in the “foreground” but we’ll take a look. https://github.com/inaturalist/iNaturalistAndroid/issues/799

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Well the message changed and the dot is now the teeniest tiniest little bird logo! Maybe we can mark solved since it doesn’t seem like it can be removed entirely?

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