Testing in-app Notifications

There are 2 types of in-app notifications:

For course updates and new courses

Notifications are sent to users when there are new courses and updated course. These notifications will only appear once although for updated courses the user will be asked to update the course when they try to access the course.

For testing this, you can publish new/updated courses to your Oppia server. The notifications may not be instant, but will appear soon, or if the app is restarted.

Reminders for users to complete courses

Notifications can be configured to remind users to complete their unfinished courses. These notifications depend on the default notifications (set up in Course Reminder Notifications), and then the users preferences for the reminder days and times.

For testing this, without needing to wait a full day (or week) for the notification to appear:

  1. Install a course on your device that is not yet completed

  2. Reset the activity for this course (on the main app screen, long press on the course, and select reset), as this will remove all your course activity from the app (but not the server)

  3. Then you can set the reminder time to be a few minutes in the future to check that it appears as expected

Note

These notifications might get shown a few minutes after the set time, eg if set to 11:00, the notification might actually appear at 11:04. This is because Android might process the notification slightly later if there are other processes that are still running, this helps Android to optimise performance and save battery.

For developers, when you build a debug version of the app (as you would when compiling and installing the app from Android studio to a connected device or AVD), in the settings (under the notifications section), you will see an additional Reminders Log. On opening this you can see the history of when the notifications settings have been changed, when the notification was processed and whether it was actually displayed or not. This can assist with debugging if you make changes to the code or settings for this.