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Comment by nixosbestos | Hacker News Reader

Um. Android has notification history also and I see no similar ability to hide notification content from the system ...

Good. The moment they add it, all kinds of apps will start to abuse it, for "sekhurity" (read: engagement) reasons. See e.g. all the apps that now disallow taking screenshots, for no legitimate reason.

Personally I'd be in favor of a hard app store policy, that if an app notifies you about something, all the importantdetails (like full message text) must be included - specifically to allow the user to view the important information without having to open the app itself.

I'm referring to what sounds like a feature of the app, not the OS... The app... already chooses what to send through the OS notification API so I really don't have any idea what scenario you're worried about.

I generally sympathize, I also don't like when apps block screenshots (or even more stupidly, they can block Android's amazing "select text from anywhere" feature...). But I don't think there are similar concerns for Signal allowing me to hide notification content from the OS.

Right. I'm saying most apps shouldn't be allowed to send a notification at all if they're not going to put the proper content in it. As it is, many apps already choose to omit notification body, instead supplying nothing or some noninformative text, forcing you to tap through to the app to see what the notification was about. If Signal is doing anything unusual here, is that it has a switch to enable showing actual content.

I get it. I am stubborn. That behavior results in a polite but direct email/review followed by an uninstall. I'm so tired of being treated like disposable crap by everyone trying to make a buck the cheapest and shittiedt way possible.

In the Signal app itself there's an option to hide the message body or both the sender and body, that way the OS wont have anything to store in the history.

-_- I see it now, on Android. Thanks for prompting me to recheck.

How do we know the message contents aren't still sent to google? Has someone verified this anywhere publicly?

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