Do you want to make important chat conversations more prominent in the notification bar of your phone and make them easier for everyone to see? At present, some mobile phone systems provide such a function, which can mark specific conversations or display them in the form of special bubbles.
How the system identifies important conversations
There are two main ways for the mobile phone system to determine which conversations need special display. The first one is that the application will actively mark the conversation as "important" when sending a notification. This is mainly used for conversations with the user's frequent contacts or conversations with many unread messages. The second one is that when the user interacts with a certain conversation at a certain frequency, the system can automatically identify it as a high-priority conversation. Both methods can trigger the conversation to be displayed in a more eye-catching bubble style on the notification bar to help users not miss key information.
To achieve this effect, application developers must use specific programming interfaces provided by the system. These interfaces allow applications to register conversations with the system, set their importance, and manage the display status of conversations. The correct use of these interfaces is the technical foundation to ensure that conversations can be recognized by the system and presented with priority.
Shortcut to post a conversation
Create and publish a "shortcut" to an important conversation, which is what the app needs to do. This process is usually accomplished by calling specific methods given by the system, such as createConversationShortcut . The system will automatically help developers manage the number limit of these shortcuts to prevent excessive consumption of resources.
Bind the "people" data object to each published shortcut to clearly identify the participants in the marked conversation. The object must at least include the participant's name, and occasionally avatar and other basic information, so that the system can accurately associate notifications with specific conversations and contacts.
Delete and clean up conversations
When a conversation is completely over, or no longer requires special attention, the application should delete the corresponding shortcut in a timely manner. This can be accomplished by calling deleteShortcut or a similar interface. Timely cleanup is beneficial to maintaining the effective use of system resources and keeping the conversation list clean.
It should be noted that if the deleted shortcut is associated with an exclusive notification channel created for users, the statistics of "deleted categories" in the system settings may increase. This reflects the system's tracking of changes in the user's personalized settings, which is normal.
Recording and utilization of interactive data
The app should accurately label all interactions the user has with shortcuts or conversations via the notification bar. For example, when a user taps the bubble in the notification bar to reply to a message, or when a user enters a conversation through a desktop gadget, such actions should be recorded by the system. This is the key for the system to understand user behavior patterns.
Using interfaces such as reportConversationInteraction that can report interaction data to the system will help the system's intelligent recommendation algorithm to sort conversations more accurately. It can also display the exact time when the user last interacted with a conversation in the interface, not to mention interactions that occurred within the application.
Compatibility strategies for different system versions
For those applications developed for newer system versions, such as Android 11 and above, such applications must follow a clear and clear set of requirements. Only in this way can their message notifications appear in the system's dedicated "dialogue space". The core requirement here is that the application must implement the Messaging Style notification, and this notification must also be associated with a long-term validity conversation shortcut that already exists when the notification is issued.
If your app targets an older version of the system, such as Android 10 or lower, there is still a way for notifications to be displayed in the conversation area. In one case, the notification uses MessagingStyle but is not associated with a shortcut; in another case, the application is recognized by the system as a messaging application, and the category parameter of the notification is set to CATEGORY_MESSAGE . In these cases, notifications are displayed in compatibility mode.
Best practices for improving user experience
In order to effectively improve user interaction, developers should follow some optimization guidelines. The first of these is to ensure that all important conversation notifications are associated with a valid shortcut. If the user finds that a conversation has been mistakenly pinned or categorized, the system needs to provide the ability to manually remove the conversation from the conversation area.
We can consider giving more abundant status settings, for example, allowing users to set different status values for the same conversation, such as "Do Not Disturb During Work" and "Emergency", and ensure that these statuses can be accurately displayed on the relevant desktop widgets, making the information clear and understandable at a glance.
Do you think that this function of prominently displaying key conversations actually improves communication efficiency, or does it occasionally cause information overload and cause interference? Welcome to share your opinions in the comment area. If you think this article is beneficial to you, don’t forget to like and forward it.
