New App Notifications & Deletions

[thet...@gmail.com]

Two questions:

Notifications:

Why are there no push notifications for incoming voicemails?  Is this not possible?

Deletions:

In the previous app version, pushing and holding a voicemail would open a pop-up menu, where one option was to delete the voicemail.  Now, the pop-up only shows an option to mark it read, not delete.  Why is that?  Is there any option somewhere to delete an individual voicemail or bulk voicemails?

Thanks.

[Steve Punter]

Sorry to the poster, I send you a reply, but did so directly and I wanted the reply to appear here, so you might be getting what appears to be a duplicate:

"Push" notifications for what my app does requires something running in the background that can be aware of a new voicemail arriving. The VoIP.ms API doesn't have a push feature, so the app would need a process running at all times in the background of your phone doing frequent "pull" requests on voicemails to determine if a new one appeared.

The free VoIP client that VoIP.ms makes available on the Play Store has this ability because it is a VoIP client. It gets push notifications of changes such as new voicemails. Even if you don't actually need a client on your phone, setting one up will provide you with push notifications.

To delete a voicemail, go to the "All VM Msgs" list, or pull up a list for an individual Voicemail by tapping on the icon at the right end of the line in the list of voicemails. Find the voicemail you wish to delete and swipe right. This reveals a "Delete" button. This is the technique used to delete ANY object in the app.

I must admit however that there is no mechanism for bulk deleting voicemails. I'll add that to the list of things to look into for the next non-bug-fix update.

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Thanks for reply.  

Since you can display waiting voicemails, I'd think it possible to send some kind of alert to a user, but, of course, I don't know the technicalities.

Regards.

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Yes, the app can show unread voicemails when the app is OPEN, but that's because it re-reads your voicemails when you bring the app to the foreground. When in the background the app is "sleeping" and can't know anything. Unless the server (VoIP.ms) provides a push method to let apps like mine know that something on their end has changed, then the only way around it is to have an always-awake process that frequently re-polls the server to see if any new voicemails have arrived.

The VoIP client provided by VoIP.ms does get push notifications, as that's its claim-to-fame. It doesn't use the public API that my app has access to, it instead uses a Voice Over IP sub-system for delivering phone calls to your device, and along with it anything else the VoIP server knows about.