Tasker Notification even no longer detects notifications from app Motorola Assist

[UncleMike]

After an update to Motorola Assist, Tasker no longer detects notifications from the app.  Reverting from Tasker 4.3b9 to 4.2u3 did not change the behavior, but uninstalling updates to Assist did correct the issue.

I know at one time Toast notifications were triggering Tasker's Notification context, and you made some changes to eliminate that problem.  Is this somehow related to Tasker missing notifications from some apps?  More importantly, is there any way to address this in Tasker?

Note: Tasker accessibility is enabled, and the Notification event does work with (most?) other apps.

[Matt R]

Turn on the SD log and see if the notification is being detected but ignored due to the notification title being blank.  That's how I verified the download manager notifications on my phone are being ignored by Tasker.  I really wish this wasn't the case ...

Matt

[UncleMike]

You hit the nail on the head!  Now my curiosity leads me to "why would they change that?"

AutoNotification does properly detect the notification, which I would expect since it's using the Notification Intercept API.  So I'll be using that for now, but I prefer Tasker's UI for Owner App selection, as opposed to AutoNotification's text input for the name of the app or the package name; since the app name appears as "Assist" in the app drawer, and "Motorola Assist" in the application manager, it took me two tries to get the app name right in the context.

Thanks for solving that puzzle.  I remember there being a reason for ignoring notifications with blank titles, but I don't remember what it was.

[Matt R]

It was something about some app(s) that sent a useful notification and immediately followed by one with a blank title, so %NTITLE would be cleared before it could be used. All becomes moot now that there are event parameter variables ....

Matt

[UncleMike]

That does sound familiar.  You're right - event parameters allows for the title to be captured without the use of %NTITLE.  A quick "fix" would be to stop ignoring the entire notification and just skip updating %NTITLE if the new title is blank, but I'm sure this would introduce other problems, particularly if there are people out there still using Notification events in conjunction with %NTITLE - in some cases %NTITLE would not be the title of the notification that triggered the event in the first place.  However, this was always a potential problem, which I think is why Pent introduced event parameters in the first place - so maybe it wouldn't be that bad.

In my particular use case, this would fix the problem, since I'm only using Assist for driving detection.  However, if I was also using it to silence my phone during meetings or while sleeping I would have no way to differentiate between various Assist notifications since Owner App and Title are the only parameters available in the built-in notification event.

The real solution is to use the Notification Listener Service, but that's only available with API level 18 or higher, which requires Android 4.3 or higher, and I can't see Pent further segmenting development - there are already a pre-4.0 version and a 4.0+ version.  I look forward to the day when Pent implements this in Tasker, since I prefer built-in functionality over plugins, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

[Matt R]

If the real problem was the same app sending two notifications with the second one being blank, it would seem like you could tell that the notification was from the same app, has no title, and was sent shortly after a non-blank one and only ignore those.

I'm looking forward to using the notification listener when I upgrade to Kit Kat in a week or two. I'd love it to be built-in too, but I expect the autonotification implementation is well done and will suffice for now.

Matt

[Eldoro Samo]

Hi folks, trying to understand this thread as I have been trying to take advantage of the X's contextual awareness with tasker.

Am I correct in interpreting that detection of Motorola's assist notification with tasker alone won't work because tasker is ignoring all notifications from assist that are somehow posted with a blank title?

Also, am I correct in understanding that currently the only way to identify tis notification is to use the autonotification plug in? (In pro mode to resource such events? )

Thanks!

[Matt R]

I believe that's true. Another vote for not ignoring these anymore...

Matt

[Eldoro Samo]

Yes thanks. Vote+
I don't want to use auto notification, it's process consumes 78 megs ...

Although, this problem is probably more on Motorola's side than taskers.

Thanks!

[John Doe]

If you are using KitKat you can try the plug Notification Listener

[Eldoro Samo]

Thanks! I didn't reaLize Notification listener was a plugin, I thought Matt was referring to the android service feature....

It did work for me to detect when the notification pops up, but now I need to detect if it's gone.

Any tips on that's achieved?

Thanks!

[John Doe]

The plug doesn't support this feature at the moment but I think it could be added.

[UncleMike]

I too believe this is correct.  Notification Listener looks promising, but since I'm already using AutoNotification I probably won't bother looking at Notification Listener unless it does something that AutoNotification doesn't do.

I'm using AutoNotification to trigger on notifications being cleared too, and I don't see any reference to this for Notification Listener.

[Eldoro Samo]

Yup - you are correct. Notification Listener currently doesn't support the identification that the notification is cleared, so I'm missing 1/2 the solution :P I emailed the dev and he was willing to add the ability to the plugin to detect notification clearing to his todo list.

I think Notification Listener would be ideal for my needs as it has a very low overhead (2-3mb) vs AutoNotification and provides just what is required for this task.

Thanks!

[Eldoro Samo]

Update about this, I'm now using the notification listener plugin to replace/implement the pushbullet's notification mirroring service using tasker. The memory usage appears to be higher when we monitor more apps. Not sure if it scales with number of monitored apps.
Thanks!

[UncleMike]

I just checked on my Moto X, and according to System Panel, AutoNotification is using 39.5MB (resident), 19.8MB (shared), 19.7MB (effective), while Android's AppManager shows it as 47MB.  Either way, 78MB sounds excessive.

I too would be interested in Notification Listener if it implemented detected clearing notifications, since listening is all I use AutoNotification for.

[Eldoro Samo]

Cool - I agree 78 seems strange. I find that the memory consumption shown in the Settings->App->Running tab can vary at times and isn't an accurate way to measure memory consumption on a single glance. I've seen tasker itself range from 11-30megs based on how busy I was in it (I always restart Tasker - services and app - after changing task settings and it usually settles around 13megs).

The dev said maybe it can happen in a few weeks after updates to support the latest tasker changes are in.

Thanks