[Android] Chat notifications are thrown away when phone wasn't online

[Fabi Winterstar]

Hi everyone, for a few weeks I noticed that I keep missing messages when I'm on the go or connecting to a network again. Turns out there is suddenly something very odd with push notifications. Because if my phone is connected to a (stable) Internet connection at all times, I receive chat notifications. But if my phone was disconnected during that time, I get no notifications at all. On Steam I still see the green message icon, so I always have to check manually.

It appears this has to do with the configuration for Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging. Because a notification shouldn't be silently discarded when a device isn't online. The notification should be saved and pushed to the users once their phone has Internet again.

As a suggestion, if this is the culprit, you might also want to check that a phone notification gets removed once the message was read somewhere else. This is supported by Google for sure, apps like Telegram do that.

My Android version is 8.1, Google Play Services and Steam Chat app are up-to-date. Reinstalling the app does not fix the issue.

Thanks a lot for looking into this

[Fabi Winterstar]

It seems like something was changed to fix this, I got an offline message notification on my phone again. Can anyone else confirm?

Edit: Nevermind, it happened again. Why are notifications for offline messages so unreliable?