I just want to express my discomfort with the fact that I received yesterday an unwanted message from someone who claimed to be Kontalk’s admin (shown as beta.kontalk.net) telling me to update Kontalk to 1.4.2 version because Google Play update doesn’t work with this version.
Although I’m sure that message was well intended I don’t like being contacted by any company or organization (even free software ones), specially when there’s in this forum an Announcements section. I would like from here thereafter any announcement to be done in that section and don’t receive any unwanted message, which I take as an invasion of my privacy.
Besides, I don’t use Google Play or any Google service (other than Youtube); I use F-Droid. Tried to use your F-Droid repo within the app, BTW, and version 1.4.2 didn’t appear. I don’t know if this was caused by the app crashes/reboot loops issue caused by Google’s SDK update.
I understand you. And know what you mean.
I did know what happens because I follow Kontalk on GitHub.
But other users could be really confused.
I know it from a friend which asked me if I know who is beta.kontalk.net and can he trust it.
Maybe there would be a way to subscribe to a information Channel or something else.
I think something like:
If I want informed about news like the message yesterday I just have to send a message (e.g.subscribe) to a special account which I have first to add to my contact list in some way (e.g.phonenumber)
Similar to a mail newsletter.
It’s hard to describe what I mean.
But hopefully you still will understand.
Got that message too. Was wondering if it was real or some one pretending as a Kontalk dev. Strange thing is I only got it on my phone, not on my tablet with the same account.
in addition to @tetris4 's suggestion I have a idea for possible implementation:
(I’m not a Developer)
Add a toggle button (Receive administrations messages like “planed server down times”) somewhere in Settings.
Set this enabled by default. (because users will not find this if it’s disabled by default)
Put a (maybe pretranslated) footer to every Admin message like: If you don’t want this infomessage in future go to Settings->blabla->Togle button and disable it.
If a user disable this, you can send a simple, already implemented command for Admin account to the server.
Hello everyone,
I’m aware that the message kind of seemed unsafe and insecure, especially because the app didn’t natively recognize it as a trusted sender. One immediate modification I’ll make is to make the app trust those messages natively - since the signature is well-known anyway.
As for the opt-in/opt-out of these messages, despite the latest one I personally sent was somewhat “advertising” and may have seemed unwanted, I’ll switch to maintenance-only messages for the moment (e.g. network downtime etc.), implementing an opt-out preference ASAP.
A next step would be to create some “news channels” with different information and a user could select which ones to subscribe to.
Sorry again if you found the message invasive. All your suggestions are very useful and I’ll carefully weight all of them.
This was really annoying. I got the message twice at 3 and 3:45am. Kontalk doesn’t allow a silent period so I was awoken twice.
If this continues, please make sure that there is a silent period setting added to Kontalk so that people can silence Kontalk whilst one is sleeping and don’t get woken up at inconvenient times. In fact, please implement this even if administration messages aren’t continuing. Some of my friends are night owls. :–)
If I switch off my phone I can’t get emergency phone calls, texts, nor emails. I believe it’s similar if I switch off notifications.
Messaging apps, such as WeChat, allow, in the settings, to decide when notifications for that particular app are inactive. This would be ideal to be incorporated into Kontalk as I, and probably many others, wouldn’t want to turn off all app notifications but don’t want to be woken by non-emergency messages.
I have tried this on my phone but it doesn’t work. The priority messages are supposed to get through but everything gets silenced. Notification LEDs don’t blink so there is no indication of a notification.
I have found that most phones have their own implementation of Android so it can’t be relied on that all phones will respond the same way. Hence, apps have had to incorporate options rather than rely on the operating system’s options.
It would be nice if Kontalk adopted this simple option.
I believe you’re looking for priority notification settings. Every app can set its own priority status (Android settings > Sound & notifications > App notifications > Kontalk > enable “Priority”). This will add Kontalk to the priority list.
Then just enable the priority sound profile (I believe there is a setting for enabling priority notifications during a time period).
