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Comment by iamcalledrob | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully a relatively easy fix on the OS side: ensure that these toasts have a higher z-index than app overlay windows.

Sidenote: I really hope Android doesn't lose the ability to do things like these overlay windows.

These types of "power user" features are often where innovation happens. It makes me sad when flexible general purpose APIs are replaced with locked down, specific ones. (e.g. overlay windows API -> a specific "chat heads" API).

The new APIs might be fine for current use cases, but ensure that innovation terminates at whatever th OS vendor designed.

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> Hopefully a relatively easy fix on the OS side: ensure that these toasts have a higher z-index than app overlay windows.

The point of the system overlay permission is to draw on top of everything else. Maybe Android should introduce some kind of overlay overlay overlay to overlay clipboard messages, but I think that would probably overcomplicate the API.

Perhaps it's better to instead send a notification when an application rendering a system overlay accesses the clipboard as well. That way, users closing out of the app can see that the application has accessed the clipboard.

Of course sufficiently privileged applications can dismiss notifications, but that requires even more difficult to attain permissions.

I think this makes a good case for something in between that can display the annoying popup chat bubbles, but can't override toasts.

Or just make it so the system-wide Toast cannot be overdrawn, it will always stay on top.

An overlay buster buster

> It makes me sad when flexible general purpose APIs are replaced with locked down, specific ones. (e.g. overlay windows API -> a specific "chat heads" API).

Doesn't have to be a replacement. It's good when you add specific APIs to do specific things that aren't very dangerous and then have the super dangerous one left as a risk signal. Innovation can still happen, common things get easier, and dangerous things get rarer. Feels pretty good to me.

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