See here: https://lemmy.world/comment/6753341
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2025
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Notifications in mobile apps aren’t easy. A developer can’t just write code for the app to poll the server every x minutes. When the app isn’t at the foreground, it’s usually frozen and can’t execute any code. So, to get notifications, the app must rely on the host operating system and must have a server running somewhere to talk to the OS. Servers cost money, so now the developer must charge something from users, or sell their data, etc.
So, rejoice on the fact that Voyager is putting you in control of your data, ethically. And just check the app every now and then.
I think in Android you can have background tasks that do the polling and alerting. No need for a separate server, but you do need to disable battery optimization for the app.
So charge money for a notifications feature, what’s the big deal? If people don’t want it they don’t have to pay.
If I were an open source developer coding for fun, I wouldn’t want to bother setting up a payment system and the whole nine yards that come with it. Sounds boring as fuck.
But hey, it’s open source, so why don’t you do it?
I wasn't critising, I was just asking "where are the notifications"
I didn’t think you were criticizing. I’m just explaining why you won’t see them.
These are super helpful replies. There’s an influx of why doesn’t this platform work like a decade + of monetized tech stack.
Can you do something like Boost (or others) for reddit that checks every X mins? Not sure if uses Google Notification system (forgot the name) but it's doable..?
I can’t, since I’m not a voyager developer. But as far as I know you have to rely on some notification system. Not sure if this can be had for free, but I know Google’s is very much not privacy respecting - which is why privacy focused phone OSs don’t bundle it.
No, I mean the dev can use this approach to make the notifications work
Yeah, fuck Google btw
I wasn’t clear whether you thought I was part of the team or not, so I decided to clarify. But yeah, it’s a common issue among open source apps.
You could create a DIY notification system if you want. In the past using a old Mac mini I had a script that would check new notifications from Lemmy rss feed if I recived an notification from Lemmy and then send a push notification to my phone using ntfy.
The script was janky it used apple script to trigger a apple short cut that sent the notification (sending a post request to ntfy).
I'm sure there is probably a more elegant way to do it.
Alternatively you could set up a RSS reader that polls Lemmy every so often to send notications.