flutter_local_notifications 1.2.0+3

A cross platform plugin for displaying and scheduling local notifications for Flutter applications with the ability to customise for each platform.

Flutter Local Notifications Plugin

A cross platform plugin for displaying local notifications.

Supported Platforms

• Android API 16+ (4.1+, the minimum version supported by Flutter). Uses the NotificationCompat APIs so it can be run older Android devices
• iOS 8.0+ (the minimum version supported by Flutter). Supports the old and new iOS notification APIs (the User Notifications Framework introduced in iOS 10 but will use the UILocalNotification APIs for devices predating iOS 10)

Features

• Mockable (plugin and API methods aren't static)
• Display basic notifications
• Scheduling when notifications should appear
• Periodically show a notification (interval based)
• Schedule a notification to be shown daily at a specified time
• Schedule a notification to be shown weekly on a specified day and time
• Retrieve a list of pending notification requests that have been scheduled to be shown in the future
• Cancelling/removing notification by id or all of them
• Specify a custom notification sound
• Ability to handle when a user has tapped on a notification, when the app is the foreground, background or terminated
• Determine if an app was launched due to tapping on a notification
• [Android] Configuring the importance level
• [Android] Configuring the priority
• [Android] Customising the vibration pattern for notifications
• [Android] Configure the default icon for all notifications
• [Android] Configure the icon for each notification (overrides the default when specified)
• [Android] Configure the large icon for each notification. The icon can be a drawable or a file on the device
• [Android] Formatting notification content via HTML markup (see https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/string-resource.html#StylingWithHTML)
• [Android] Support for the following notification styles
  • Big picture
  • Big text
  • Inbox
  • Messaging
  • Media
    • While media playback control using a MediaSession.Token is not supported, with this style you let Android treat the largeIcon bitmap as album artwork
• [Android] Group notifications
• [Android] Show progress notifications
• [Android] Configure notification visibility on the lockscreen
• [iOS] Request notification permissions and customise the permissions being requested around displaying notifications

Note that this plugin aims to provide abstractions for all platforms as opposed to having methods that only work on specific platforms. However, each method allows passing in "platform-specifics" that contains data that is specific for customising notifications on each platform. This approach means that some scenarios may not be covered by the plugin. Developers can either fork or maintain their code for showing notifications in these situations. Note that the plugin still under development so expect the API surface to change over time.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• Recurring notifications on Android use the Alarm Manager API. This is standard practice but does mean the delivery of the notifications/alarms are inexact and this is documented Android behaviour as per the previous link. Note that it's been reported that Samsung's implementation of Android has imposed a maximum of 500 alarms that can be scheduled via this API and exceptions can occur when going over the limit
• iOS has a limit on how many pending notifications it allows. This is a limit imposed by iOS where it will only keep 64 notifications that will fire the soonest
• Known issue: There is a known issue with handling daylight savings for scheduled notifications. This functionality may be deprecated to be replaced by another that only deals with elapsed time since epoch instead of a date.

Screenshots

Android	iOS

Acknowledgements

• Javier Lecuona for submitting the PR that added the ability to have notifications shown daily
• Jeff Scaturro for submitting the PR to fix the iOS issue around showing daily and weekly notifications and migrating the plugin to AndroidX
• Ian Cavanaugh for helping create a sample to reproduce the problem reported in issue #88
• Zhang Jing for adding 'ticker' support for Android notifications
• ...and everyone else for their contributions. They are greatly appreciated

Getting Started

The GitHub repository has an example app that should demonstrate of all the supported features of the plugin. Please check the example for more detailed code samples. If you only copy and paste the Dart code then this will not work as there's setup required for each platform. Pub also generates API docs for the latest version here. Besides referring to the example app and getting started section, please ensure that you have performed the steps in the integration guide for each platform further below.

The following samples will demonstrate the more commonly used functionalities. The first step is to create a new instance of the plugin class and then initialise it with the settings to use for each platform

FlutterLocalNotificationsPlugin flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin = FlutterLocalNotificationsPlugin();
// initialise the plugin. app_icon needs to be a added as a drawable resource to the Android head project
var initializationSettingsAndroid = AndroidInitializationSettings('app_icon');
var initializationSettingsIOS = IOSInitializationSettings(
    onDidReceiveLocalNotification: onDidReceiveLocalNotification);
var initializationSettings = InitializationSettings(
    initializationSettingsAndroid, initializationSettingsIOS);
await flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin.initialize(initializationSettings,
    onSelectNotification: onSelectNotification);

Initialisation should only be done once and the place where this can be done is in the main function of the your application. Alternatively, this can be done within the first page shown in your app. Developers should look at the example app, which does the initialisation within the main function as the code below is simplified for explaining the concepts. Here we specify we have specified the default icon to use for notifications on Android (refer to the Android Integration section) and designated the function (onSelectNotification) that should fire when a notification has been tapped on. Specifying this callback is entirely optional. In this example, it will trigger navigation to another page and display the payload associated with the notification.

Future onSelectNotification(String payload) async {
    if (payload != null) {
      debugPrint('notification payload: ' + payload);
    }
    await Navigator.push(
      context,
      MaterialPageRoute(builder: (context) => SecondScreen(payload)),
    );
}

In the real world, this payload could represent the id of the item you want to display the details of. Once the initialisation has been done, then you can manage the displaying of notifications.

Notes around initialisation: if the app had been launched by tapping on a notification created by this plugin, calling initialize is what will trigger the onSelectNotification to trigger to handle the notification that the user tapped on. An alternative to handling the "launch notification" is to call the getNotificationAppLaunchDetails method that is available in the plugin. This could be used, for example, to change the home route of the app for deep-linking. Calling initialize will still cause the onSelectNotification callback to fire for the launch notification. It will be up to developers to ensure that they don't process the same notification twice (e.g. by storing and comparing the notification id).

[iOS only] Requesting notification permissions

By default this plugin will request notification permissions when it is initialised. IOSInitializationSettings have three named parameters:

1. requestSoundPermission,
2. requestBadgePermission,
3. requestAlertPermission that control this behaviour.

If you want to request permissions at a later point in your application on iOS, set all of the above to false.

FlutterLocalNotificationsPlugin flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin =  FlutterLocalNotificationsPlugin();
var initializationSettingsAndroid =
    AndroidInitializationSettings('app_icon');
var initializationSettingsIOS = IOSInitializationSettings(
        requestSoundPermission: false,
        requestBadgePermission: false,
        requestAlertPermission: false,
        onDidReceiveLocalNotification: onDidReceiveLocalNotification,
    );
var initializationSettings = InitializationSettings(
    initializationSettingsAndroid, initializationSettingsIOS);
await flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin.initialize(initializationSettings,
    onSelectNotification: onSelectNotification);

Then call requestPermissions method with desired permissions at the appropriate point in your application

var result = await flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin
          .resolvePlatformSpecificImplementation<
              IOSFlutterLocalNotificationsPlugin>()
          ?.requestPermissions(
            alert: true,
            badge: true,
            sound: true,
          );

Here the call to flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin.resolvePlatformSpecificImplementation<IOSFlutterLocalNotificationsPlugin>() returns the iOS implementation of the plugin that contains APIs specific to iOS, provided that the application is running on iOS. The ?. operator is used here as the result will be null when run on other platforms. Developers may alternative choose to guard this call by checking the platform their application is running on.

Displaying a notification

var androidPlatformChannelSpecifics = AndroidNotificationDetails(
    'your channel id', 'your channel name', 'your channel description',
    importance: Importance.Max, priority: Priority.High, ticker: 'ticker');
var iOSPlatformChannelSpecifics = IOSNotificationDetails();
var platformChannelSpecifics = NotificationDetails(
    androidPlatformChannelSpecifics, iOSPlatformChannelSpecifics);
await flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin.show(
    0, 'plain title', 'plain body', platformChannelSpecifics,
    payload: 'item x');

In this block of code, the details for each platform have been specified. This includes the channel details that is required for Android 8.0+. The payload has been specified ('item x'), that will passed back through your application when the user has tapped on a notification. Note that for Android devices that notifications will only in appear in the tray and won't appear as a toast aka heads-up notification unless things like the priority/importance has been set appropriately. Refer to the Android docs (https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/notifiers/notifications.html#Heads-up) for additional information. Note that the "ticker" text is passed here though it is optional and specific to Android. This allows for text to be shown in the status bar on older versions of Android when the notification is shown.

Scheduling a notification

var scheduledNotificationDateTime =
        DateTime.now().add(Duration(seconds: 5));
var androidPlatformChannelSpecifics =
    AndroidNotificationDetails('your other channel id',
        'your other channel name', 'your other channel description');
var iOSPlatformChannelSpecifics =
    IOSNotificationDetails();
NotificationDetails platformChannelSpecifics = NotificationDetails(
    androidPlatformChannelSpecifics, iOSPlatformChannelSpecifics);
await flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin.schedule(
    0,
    'scheduled title',
    'scheduled body',
    scheduledNotificationDateTime,
    platformChannelSpecifics);

Note that on Android devices, the default behaviour is that the notification may not be delivered at the specified time when the device in a low-power idle mode. This behaviour can be changed by setting the optional parameter named androidAllowWhileIdle to true when calling the schedule method.

Periodically show a notification with a specified interval

// Show a notification every minute with the first appearance happening a minute after invoking the method
var androidPlatformChannelSpecifics =
    AndroidNotificationDetails('repeating channel id',
        'repeating channel name', 'repeating description');
var iOSPlatformChannelSpecifics =
    IOSNotificationDetails();
var platformChannelSpecifics = NotificationDetails(
    androidPlatformChannelSpecifics, iOSPlatformChannelSpecifics);
await flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin.periodicallyShow(0, 'repeating title',
    'repeating body', RepeatInterval.EveryMinute, platformChannelSpecifics);

Show a daily notification at a specific time

var time = Time(10, 0, 0);
var androidPlatformChannelSpecifics =
    AndroidNotificationDetails('repeatDailyAtTime channel id',
        'repeatDailyAtTime channel name', 'repeatDailyAtTime description');
var iOSPlatformChannelSpecifics =
    IOSNotificationDetails();
var platformChannelSpecifics = NotificationDetails(
    androidPlatformChannelSpecifics, iOSPlatformChannelSpecifics);
await flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin.showDailyAtTime(
    0,
    'show daily title',
    'Daily notification shown at approximately ${_toTwoDigitString(time.hour)}:${_toTwoDigitString(time.minute)}:${_toTwoDigitString(time.second)}',
    time,
    platformChannelSpecifics);

Show a weekly notification on specific day and time

var time = Time(10, 0, 0);
var androidPlatformChannelSpecifics =
    AndroidNotificationDetails('show weekly channel id',
        'show weekly channel name', 'show weekly description');
var iOSPlatformChannelSpecifics =
    IOSNotificationDetails();
var platformChannelSpecifics = NotificationDetails(
    androidPlatformChannelSpecifics, iOSPlatformChannelSpecifics);
await flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin.showWeeklyAtDayAndTime(
    0,
    'show weekly title',
    'Weekly notification shown on Monday at approximately ${_toTwoDigitString(time.hour)}:${_toTwoDigitString(time.minute)}:${_toTwoDigitString(time.second)}',
    Day.Monday,
    time,
    platformChannelSpecifics);

Retrieve pending notification requests

var pendingNotificationRequests =
        await flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin.pendingNotificationRequests();

[Android only] Grouping notifications

This is a "translation" of the sample available at https://developer.android.com/training/notify-user/group.html For iOS, you could just display the summary notification (not shown in the example) as otherwise the following code would show three notifications

String groupKey = 'com.android.example.WORK_EMAIL';
String groupChannelId = 'grouped channel id';
String groupChannelName = 'grouped channel name';
String groupChannelDescription = 'grouped channel description';
// example based on https://developer.android.com/training/notify-user/group.html
AndroidNotificationDetails firstNotificationAndroidSpecifics =
    AndroidNotificationDetails(
        groupChannelId, groupChannelName, groupChannelDescription,
        importance: Importance.Max,
        priority: Priority.High,
        groupKey: groupKey);
NotificationDetails firstNotificationPlatformSpecifics =
    NotificationDetails(firstNotificationAndroidSpecifics, null);
await flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin.show(1, 'Alex Faarborg',
    'You will not believe...', firstNotificationPlatformSpecifics);
AndroidNotificationDetails secondNotificationAndroidSpecifics =
    AndroidNotificationDetails(
        groupChannelId, groupChannelName, groupChannelDescription,
        importance: Importance.Max,
        priority: Priority.High,
        groupKey: groupKey);
NotificationDetails secondNotificationPlatformSpecifics =
    NotificationDetails(secondNotificationAndroidSpecifics, null);
await flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin.show(
    2,
    'Jeff Chang',
    'Please join us to celebrate the...',
    secondNotificationPlatformSpecifics);

// create the summary notification required for older devices that pre-date Android 7.0 (API level 24)
List<String> lines = List<String>();
lines.add('Alex Faarborg  Check this out');
lines.add('Jeff Chang    Launch Party');
InboxStyleInformation inboxStyleInformation = InboxStyleInformation(
    lines,
    contentTitle: '2 new messages',
    summaryText: '[e-mail]');
AndroidNotificationDetails androidPlatformChannelSpecifics =
    AndroidNotificationDetails(
        groupChannelId, groupChannelName, groupChannelDescription,
        style: NotificationStyleAndroid.Inbox,
        styleInformation: inboxStyleInformation,
        groupKey: groupKey,
        setAsGroupSummary: true);
NotificationDetails platformChannelSpecifics =
    NotificationDetails(androidPlatformChannelSpecifics, null);
await flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin.show(
    3, 'Attention', 'Two new messages', platformChannelSpecifics);

Cancelling/deleting a notification

// cancel the notification with id value of zero
await flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin.cancel(0);

Cancelling/deleting all notifications

await flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin.cancelAll();

Get details on if the app was launched via a notification created by this plugin

 var notificationAppLaunchDetails =
     await flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin.getNotificationAppLaunchDetails();

This should cover the basic functionality. Please check out the example directory for a sample app that illustrates the rest of the functionality available and refer to the API docs for more information. Also read the below on what you need to configure on each platform

Android Integration

If your application needs the ability to schedule notifications then you need to request permissions to be notified when the phone has been booted as scheduled notifications uses the AlarmManager API to determine when notifications should be displayed. However, they are cleared when a phone has been turned off. Requesting permission requires adding the following to the manifest

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED"/>

The following is also needed to ensure scheduled notifications remain scheduled upon a reboot (this is handled by the plugin)

<receiver android:name="com.dexterous.flutterlocalnotifications.ScheduledNotificationBootReceiver">
    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="android.intent.action.BOOT_COMPLETED"></action>
    </intent-filter>
</receiver>

Developers will also need to add the following so that plugin can handle displaying scheduled notifications

<receiver android:name="com.dexterous.flutterlocalnotifications.ScheduledNotificationReceiver" />

If the vibration pattern of an Android notification will be customised then add the following

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.VIBRATE" />

Notification icons should be added as a drawable resource. The example project/code shows how to set default icon for all notifications and how to specify one for each notification. It is possible to use launcher icon/mipmap and this by default is @mipmap/ic_launcher in the Android manifest and can be passed AndroidInitializationSettings constructor. However, the offical Android guidance is that you should use drawable resources. Custom notification sounds should be added as a raw resource and the sample illustrates how to play a notification with a custom sound. Refer to the following links around Android resources and notification icons.

• https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/providing-resources
• https://developer.android.com/studio/write/image-asset-studio#notification
• https://developer.android.com/guide/practices/ui_guidelines/icon_design_status_bar

When specifying the large icon bitmap or big picture bitmap (associated with the big picture style), bitmaps can be either a drawable resource or file on the device. This is specified via a single property (e.g. the largeIcon property associated with the AndroidNotificationDetails class) and there will be a corresponding property of the BitmapSource enum type (e.g. largeIconBitmapSource) that indicates if the string value represents the name of the drawable resource or the path to the bitmap file.

Note that with Android 8.0+, sounds and vibrations are associated with notification channels and can only be configured when they are first created. Showing/scheduling a notification will create a channel with the specified id if it doesn't exist already. If another notification specifies the same channel id but tries to specify another sound or vibration pattern then nothing occurs.

When doing a release build of your app, you'll likely need to customise your ProGuard configuration file as per this link and add the following line.

-keep class com.dexterous.** { *; }

The plugin also makes use of GSON and the Proguard rules can be found here. The example app has a consolidate Proguard rules (proguard-rules.pro) file that combines these together for reference.

If you have resource shrinking enabled, ensure that you have customised the resources that should be kept so that things like your notification images aren't discarded by following the instructions here.

IMPORTANT: Starting from version 0.5.0, this library no longer uses the deprecated Android support libraries and has migrated to AndroidX. Developers may require migrating their apps to support this following this guide

iOS Integration

Add the following lines to the didFinishLaunchingWithOptions method in the AppDelegate.m/AppDelegate.swift file of your iOS project

Objective-C:

if (@available(iOS 10.0, *)) {
  [UNUserNotificationCenter currentNotificationCenter].delegate = (id<UNUserNotificationCenterDelegate>) self;
}

Swift:

if #available(iOS 10.0, *) {
  UNUserNotificationCenter.current().delegate = self as? UNUserNotificationCenterDelegate
}

By design, iOS applications do not display notifications when they're in the foreground. For iOS 10+, use the presentation options to control the behaviour for when a notification is triggered while the app is in the foreground. For older versions of iOS, you need to handle the callback as part of specifying the method that should be fired to the onDidReceiveLocalNotification argument when creating an instance IOSInitializationSettings object that is passed to the function for initializing the plugin. A snippet below from the sample app shows how this can be done

// initialise the plugin. app_icon needs to be a added as a drawable resource to the Android head project
var initializationSettingsAndroid =
    AndroidInitializationSettings('app_icon');
var initializationSettingsIOS = IOSInitializationSettings(
    onDidReceiveLocalNotification: onDidReceiveLocalNotification);
var initializationSettings = InitializationSettings(
    initializationSettingsAndroid, initializationSettingsIOS);
flutterLocalNotificationsPlugin.initialize(initializationSettings,
    onSelectNotification: onSelectNotification);

...

  Future onDidReceiveLocalNotification(
      int id, String title, String body, String payload) async {
    // display a dialog with the notification details, tap ok to go to another page
    showDialog(
      context: context,
      builder: (BuildContext context) => CupertinoAlertDialog(
            title: Text(title),
            content: Text(body),
            actions: [
              CupertinoDialogAction(
                isDefaultAction: true,
                child: Text('Ok'),
                onPressed: () async {
                  Navigator.of(context, rootNavigator: true).pop();
                  await Navigator.push(
                    context,
                    MaterialPageRoute(
                      builder: (context) => SecondScreen(payload),
                    ),
                  );
                },
              )
            ],
          ),
    );
  }

If you have set notifications to be periodically shown, then on older iOS versions (< 10), if the application was uninstalled without cancelling all alarms then the next time it's installed you may see the "old" notifications being fired. If this is not the desired behaviour, then you can add code similar to the following to the didFinishLaunchingWithOptions method of your AppDelegate class.

Objective-C:

if(![[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults]objectForKey:@"Notification"]){
    [[UIApplication sharedApplication] cancelAllLocalNotifications];
    [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults]setBool:YES forKey:@"Notification"];
}

Swift:

if(!UserDefaults.standard.bool(forKey: "Notification")) {
    UIApplication.shared.cancelAllLocalNotifications()
    UserDefaults.standard.set(true, forKey: "Notification")
}

When using custom notification sound, developers should be aware that iOS enforces restrictions on this (e.g. supported file formats). As of this writing, this is documented by Apple at

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/unnotificationsound?language=objc

IMPORTANT: There is an issue that prevents this plugin working properly with the firebase_messaging plugin at this point in time. This is being tracked here. Please upvote if this issue is important to you for the Flutter team to prioritise. I currently have a pull request to the firebase_messaging plugin waiting to be reviewed on this issue. For those that want to use my fork for their apps whilst waiting for the issue to be fixed, it can be found at https://github.com/MaikuB/flutterfire. See here to see how it can be referenced in your application's pubspec.yaml file.

Testing

As the plugin class is not static, it is possible to mock and verify it's behaviour when writing tests as part of your application. Check the source code for a sample test suite can be found at test/flutter_local_notifications_test.dart that demonstrates how this can be done. If you decide to use the plugin class directly as part of your tests, note that the methods will be mostly a no-op and methods that return data will return default values. Part of this is because the plugin detects if you're running on a supported plugin to determine which platform implementation of the plugin should be used. If it's neither Android or iOS, then it defaults to the aforementioned behaviour to reduce friction when writing tests. If this not desired then consider using mocks. Note there is also a named constructor that can be used to pass the platform for the plugin to resolve the desired platform-specific implementation.