This is super cool! I was just curious, though, why are push notifications an unlikely feature? If its hard to set up or something I totally understand, it just seems like a foundational thing for a mobile chat client. I remember chumdroid having notifications, but thats like super outdated and nigh unusable now, so its just sort of a shame theres no way to get mobile notifs anymore. Great work either way though, dont want to sound too negative!
hi! thanks for using pchum godot
the push notifications thing is mostly due to what framework im using to build the app. I use the godot (game) engine, which is (as you may have guessed) mostly for making games. It just happens to be really chill and nice to work with for apps/software aswell. This + the fact that it works on a bunch of platforms (and so isnt optimized for phones specifically) means its not really intended for something like this. Through godot i dont have a way to easily access the direct platform integrations (like the android system libraries) which is required to make background notifs work. It is possible but quite challenging though.
Android is very picky about how your app behaves if you want it to do things in the background, which is why there is no ready-made fix for this kinda thing inside godot. there is a way i can make this work, and ive been working on it on & off for a little while now. It has some caveats like how i need to move some of the technical innards to the Java language and such, but i think i have a way to make it possible. Its just a very specific solution, and i have very very little experience with Java & the android libraries so i havent been able to make it work quite yet. i do intend to have the next update have background processing at the very least (so you don’t get disconnected when you leave the app) and i think if that works, notifications should also be possible.
thanks for the comment, and i hope this was a decent explanation :P