Android Widget to directly access a contact's conversation

Feature Proposal
1

Hello,
I would like to suggest the addition of a Android widget that allows one to directly access a contact’s conversation from the Android homescreen. This way it’s possible to quickly talk to a contact without navigating through the app. As I have only very few contact I talk to through delta chat, I could accelerate things a bit this way :slight_smile:
You only spare one or two taps, but out of three that a lot.

This is already exactly implemented in the XMPP Conversations android app.
(iNPUTmice/Conversations: Conversations is an open source XMPP/Jabber client for Android - Codeberg.org)
I reckon quite a bit is reusable from that implementation.

Thanks for listening.
Cheers.

2

adding shortcuts to dedicated chats to the homesscreen is already possible for recent chats with somehow recent androids :tada:

  • long tap the “Delta Chat” icon, you see the most recent chats there
  • drag the desired chat to the homescreen

by the way, on iOS, there is a similar option using “Add to Widget” from the chat’s profile

i directly created a little tip on our favourite social media for that: bjoern: "💡did you know ... you can have recent #deltachat …" - Mastodon

3

Fantastic! I did not know that you could pull things out of that contextual menu in Android.
To go further: would that be possible to have the keyboard to pull up upon following one of those shortcut? This would spare one other tap :slight_smile:

4

hm, not sure if going for a different keyboard behaviour than when opening the chat normally would improve overall UX.

one may as well have a chat on the homescreen that is a larger group that one mainly reads.

often it is better UX wise to have predictable behaviors. if one always writes in a chat, the second tap usually goes to the finger memory and one does not even think about that :slight_smile:

1 Like
5

That’s a fair point :slight_smile:

What about a toggle setting that changes this for all chats? Like “Pullup
keyboard upon opening chat” under Settings → Chats and Media, which
would be by default set to false?

6

usually, we avoid settings and upfront questions wherever we can.

we are always trying hard to remove them, and are adding switches only when we see a really huge impact for lots of users. reason is to have a clear, uncluttered UI, few modes and paths, for all of, user, support and devs.

i know, other apps do that differently, and have tons of switches - but this is not our mode.

so, i do not see that in this case. also, compared to the level of detail we otherwise have customisable in the app, i do not think such a switch will make it.

1 Like
7

Yes I can see that. Thanks for taking the time to answer.

1 Like