notification disappears after showing

Question

We have code similar to the following in our app

    val pendingIntent = PendingIntent.getActivity(ctx, id.toInt(), intent, PendingIntent.FLAG_CANCEL_CURRENT)
    val builder = NotificationCompat.Builder(ctx, Channel.TEST_CHANNEL.channelId)
    builder.setTicker(tickerText)
            .setContentTitle(contentTitle)
            .setContentText(contentText)
            .setVibrate(vibrate)
            .setSmallIcon(icon)
            .setAutoCancel(true)
            .setLights(-0xff0100, 300, 1000)
            .setSound(uri)
            .setContentIntent(pendingIntent)
            .setStyle(NotificationCompat.BigTextStyle().bigText(contentText))
            .addAction(R.drawable.ic_notification, ctx.getString(R.string.notification), piAction)

    val notification = builder.build()
    val nf = ctx.getSystemService(Context.NOTIFICATION_SERVICE) as NotificationManager
    nf.notify(NOTIFICATION_TAG, id.toInt(), notification)
}

Starting recently we noticed that notifications on some device running Android 8+ started disappearing briefly after being shown, without user's interaction. Setting auto-cancel to false helps, but the user experience degrades.

The id is a unique item id from the database. This may be important thing to note - technically we can have a notification with such id be shown, removed/canceleld by user, and later some time used again for a similar notification with the same id. Can this be the reason?

Answer 1

We've updated the support libs and tried the following method on builder for luck:

 builder.setTicker(tickerText)
        ...
        .setTimeoutAfter(-1)
        ...

Setting this param to a positive value delayed the notification disappearing by that amount of time (so it did affect). Thus we tried a negative number, the notifications seem to stay there now.

I couldn't find any reasonable documentation explaining this, so this answer is not 100%, but keeping it here for now for others to try and see if it helps them.