android: no prompt to enable notifications

[bassosimone]

Describe the bug

It seems I cannot get the app to prompt me to enable notifications in the system settings.

To Reproduce

I compiled the app for myself using the procedure at #2504 (which entails using a custom signing key as opposed to the official one—perhaps we can improve this part of the process?). I installed the app accepting all the default settings. I verified that the settings did not contain notifications enabled for OONI Probe. I went into the settings were notifications were not enabled. I clicked to enable notifications but the settings still showed the notifications as disabled.

Expected behavior

Per the pre-release check-list that I am following, I should be prompted like I am prompted when I enable running in the background, i.e., with a system settings popup asking me to enable notifications.

Screenshots

System information (please complete the following information):

• Device: Pixel 4a
• OS: Android 13
• OONI Probe version: ooni/probe-android@36b29ca and v3.8.3 installed from the play store (and using v3.17.5 as its engine)

Additional context

I wonder whether linking a library for a functionality we do not use (i.e., notifications) is preferable over removing this dependency considering that we do seldomly use this functionality and we're not sure whether it would even work in countries with lots of censorship.

[bassosimone]

I am reopening this issue because there are two additional matters to discuss:

1. we need to discuss internally whether the following popup is fine:

or whether we'd like another approach. Specifically, we may want to: ask for permission to send notifications and wrap the system dialog into our own model explaining why we need to send notifications.

2. there is a clash between Android 13's request for notifications (i.e., notifications generated by the app that deal with nettests progress and completion) and our own push notification settings. Because Android system dialogs use the wording "notification" to describe the former, we probably need to change the copy of our settings to say push notifications explicitly, otherwise we would have rather confusing settings and wording.

[bassosimone]

We're going to ship the above popup in the upcoming v3.8.3 ooni/probe-android release. We're having an internal conversation regarding how it's best to proceed in terms of organizing dynamic permissions.