Notifications show no contents most of the time

[ShadowJonathan]

Steps to reproduce

No idea, have sent rageshake with “Notifications missing”

Outcome

What did you expect?

Element to work properly with multiple notification types, as per a recent change.

What happened instead?

About 75% of my notifications are delivered like that, no content, and when tapping on them, I get to different rooms with unread messages.

Ironically, while navigating to submit this issue, I got another one;

Your phone model

iPhone 11

Operating system version

iOS 15.1

Application version

1.6.8

Homeserver

jboi.nl

Will you send logs?

Yes

[ShadowJonathan]

I'd like to mention that this is still going on, and has caused me frustration wrt responding and "inboxing" my notifications correctly.

Notifications on iOS currently trigger a sync, however, on a server such as mine (jboi.nl) this sync can be expensive or not worth it with the amount of rooms I'm in + the relative "low power" of the server im using it with, this most likely creates these half-finished notifications. This has also caused me a lot of aggravation as the app replays all of these "cached syncs" upon the app opening, causing the room list to jump around about a 100 times before it "settles".

I think a solution to this would be to switch the notification extension code to use fetch + context clues for non-encrypted events, and use sync only for encrypted events. In addition to that, for fetching encryption keys for an encrypted event, a sync with a filter that matches no event could be used, this speeds up sync unconditionally, while also emptying any to_device queue the server wants to send to the app.

[kittykat]

@ShadowJonathan are you still experiencing the issue? I haven't been able to reproduce it

[ShadowJonathan]

Yes, I'm still having this issue from time to time.

I'd recommend asking people with large accounts and (relatively) slow servers to reproduce this.

[ShadowJonathan]

It mainly happens when my device has been unable to sync for an extended amount of time, it seems that some chats are causing notifications, but that the notifications sync loop isn't able to properly catch up, so it just emits a blank notification.

[ShadowJonathan]

The only pattern to this is when I haven't used Element on my phone for a good while (12-ish hours), after which it will only display these kinds of notifications.

I recommend testing with a customised homeserver that;

• Sends APNS quickly
• Takes a while (30+ secs or so) to generate a sync response.

---

Alternatively, this could also possibly happen if my device has a lot of syncs over an extended period of time.

To test that, I recommend having a large account on a slow server, and enabling noisy notifications for some semi-active rooms, and not opening the app for some time.

[thsmdt]

I am likely encountering the same issue and glad to help if you have any requests for information. However, the scenario seems quite similar overall.

I am self-hosting a homeserver (Synapse 1.56, vServer with 2CPUs and 4GB) for myself with one account. The issue started a couple of months ago and is persistent. In my case, even using the app frequently to message people does not work around the problem.

[pixlwave]

Takes a while (30+ secs or so) to generate a sync response.

This is likely the root cause of the issue you're seeing here. iOS has strict time limits on the Notification Service Extension, and if they're exceeded the original notification is displayed without letting us finish getting the information required to update it 😕

[ShadowJonathan]

Then that is a problem IMO, because my homeserver isn't getting any faster, and my account isn't getting any smaller, so if there's a way to make it not rely on sync (say, fetch the event directly, and do a sync with a no-timeline-events filter to grab only the to-device keys), then this could be solved.

[thsmdt]

I have a quick update for you all 😅

I was not aware of the fact that PIN/FaceID apparently disables all notifications contents (for some reason)? It got a lot better now, that I disabled this security feature, but the issue does not seem to be fully resolved by this just yet.

[ItsEcholot]

This is really weird I might be suffering from the same but I also use FaceID so it might also be #6043... But for me it's more like 25% of the messages arrive empty. How can this be when FaceID is enabled?

[jackmawer]

I have a quick update for you all 😅

I was not aware of the fact that PIN/FaceID apparently disables all notifications contents (for some reason)? It got a lot better now, that I disabled this security feature, but the issue does not seem to be fully resolved by this just yet.

i faced the same issue and disabling faceid appears to have (mostly?) resolved it for now. why does enabling this prevent notifications? it's not at all obvious as an end user.