downsides of disabling ongoing notifcations and status bar icon?

[trio180]

Hello,

I want to disable ongoing notifications so I have better compatibility with my Pebble smart watch.  All ongoing notifications are being sent to my watch, and with 8 email accounts going off every 15 minutes, it's not pleasant. 

I see in the look-and-feel settings, that I can only disable ongoing notifications if I also disable the status bar icon.  However the description of the option says it's not recommended to disable the status bar icon but it doesn't say what will happen.

So what are the downsides of disabling the status bar icon and the ongoing operations notifications?

Thanks

[Kostya Vasilyev]

The status bar icon has to do with how the app stays in memory, avoiding being killed, while checking mail or working in push mode.

This (the icon) is "Android by the book", and is the Googlers' decision.

If you turn the icon off, the app will utilize its own means to avoid getting kicked out of memory (which will stop push mail).

So - do try to turn it off, see how it works for you.

One more thing:

It seems that every single app that reads notifications from other apps has the error of confusing "ongoing" and "event" notifications. Sad to see that Pebble's is among them.

There are two ways to check for ongoing notifications:

1 - Not specific for my app:

Notification.FLAG_ONGOING_EVENT

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Notification.html#FLAG_ONGOING_EVENT

2 - Specific to AquaMail:

The notification's Intent has an extra called "org.kman.AquaMail.IGNORE_NOTIFICATION".

Maybe you can relay the above info to Pebble support.

[trio180]

Thanks for the information.

The official Pebble app doesn't actually collect all notifications.  So I use a 3rd party app called Pebble Notifier to collect all notifications and send them to the pebble watch.

I contacted the developer of Pebble Notifier and he actually has a beta which filters out ongoing notifications.  He gave me access to this version and I'm happy to say everything works well now.  I turned status bar icon and ongoing messages back on, so I do not know how well it would've worked for me.

[Kostya Vasilyev]

Thanks. Great to hear things got fixed where they should.