Notifications API

[jakef]

This is a much-needed interface. Adding a notifications API would allows developers to create interactive applications which, much like the steps left in this hour application, would allow for a richer end-user experience. This would open the door to developers create applications which support healthful reminders such as ones to remember to drink water or to get to bed on time.

Thanks

[JonFitbit]

Thanks for the suggestion, it definitely would make a great addition to the SDK. We'd love to see other use cases added to this thread.

[jakef]

At first glance this sdk hints at allowing developer applications to run as background processes which, from what I can tell from the vision of the Fitbit team, doesn't sound super appealing (battery life). An alternative would be to allow developers to register event handlers with another running (main) process. This way the 3rd party app wouldn't need to be running to receive events. The main process could wake the app and the app could run, in this case, some code which brings up a notification. Alternatively, another more restrictive alternative which could be used to limit draining battery, would be to allow developers to register event handlers which do not allow for arbitrary code execution, but instead allow for certain predefined functionality, e.g. a notification, to be associated with events

[that0n3guy]

One of Jake's use cases was to open/wake a watch app.  This would take care of:

• https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Feature-Suggestions/add-support-for-listening-to-a-port-in-companion...
• as well as https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Feature-Suggestions/Background-notifications-for-Ionic-Versa-apps/id...

Otheer use cases for being able to launch watch apps remotely:

• ability to shut off phone alarm from watch.   This was easy with the pebble: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=caller.alarmist&hl=en_US
• ability to create fun add-on notifications like "drink more water" or "you took 10k steps today... great job!" or "your friends took 5k steps, you only did 4k, try harder tomorrow, its a new day!" (very pebble-esk ideas)
• ability to auto-launch apps to push sleep info to 3rd party apps: https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Feature-Suggestions/Sleep-as-Android-Integration/idi-p/1380873
• to create "simulated alarms" on important calendar events
• launch an app from an android "tasker" event.

[Jetiandresito]

I support this hoping that if will help to improve the communication between the phone and the watch of my Sleep as Android applications.

[goldfish_23]

Yep notifications API to support Sleep as Android would be good!

[ipwitan]

The watch could send a notice to the phone that the watch was fully charged!   ...and to put the watch back on.

Or just a simple reminder to put the watch back on. If the watch isn't sensing anything for an hour, it could communicate that it misses me.

[melissa.bee]

Use case: The ability to accept multi-factor authentication login request approvals on the FitBit device, eliminating the need to use your phone to do so (e.g. Duo Auth). This would meet the community request for this feature which has been raised before:

https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Other-Versa-Smartwatches/Duo-Mobile-support-on-Fitbit-Versa/td-p/261...