Missing explanation for some of the settings options

#1

So what’s up with the following settings options:

Reliable background connection (disabled by default)
Requires a permanent notification

How do I know if I need this enabled and does it consume significantly more battery? Benefits or disadvantages?

On-demand location streaming (disabled by default)

I have tested this by enabling it for 5 minutes, but all it does is add a green location marker at the top right and the message “Location streaming enabled”.

I have the two phones here side by side and there is no location mark on either phone when I access the map by clicking on the map icon.

Also not sure what the “Show locations in time frame” slider and the “Show traces” option (disabled by default) are for, because they don’t do anything.

Either I’m missing something with this or it’s not working yet because it’s an experimental feature?

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#2

If notifications are not received in time, it may be because your phone kills the app. Adding a permanent notification may prevent the app from being killed on some phones or at least let you notice when it is killed. It does not consume significantly more battery. Of course if DC is killed, it will not consume any battery at all, but I guess it’s not what you want.

If you don’t have any problems with notifications being late, you don’t need to enable this setting.

On-demand location streaming setting does not start streaming right away. To start streaming you need to send your location in some chat (could be a Saved Messages chat if you only want to test) by “attaching” it. The option to attach location becomes available when you enable “On-demand location streaming” in the settings.

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#3

OK, so far I don’t seem to need the Reliable background connection option on our POCO X3 NFC phones with ArrowOS, but I haven’t thoroughly tested the situation with notifications yet, so I’ll keep an eye on this.

After playing around with On-demand location streaming some more I have decided to disable that feature again, because I’m using the Surfshark VPN app to mock my location and I’m not really sure how the Delta Chat app gets the location data, because during my tests my location was neither shown as the location of the VPN node (which would have been expected due to the configured mock location app), nor my real location. The phone also kept showing a notification that Delta Chat has access to my location at all times, which I found annoying (wasn’t sure how to turn those notifications off).

As far as I have seen, the On-demand location streaming feature has two purposes, on one hand actual location sharing, on the other hand it allows marking locations on the map to share. Maybe the two can be separated into two configuration options, so that it’s possible to access the map and share location marks without having to share the own location? Because right now access to the map disappears once On-demand location streaming is disabled.

#4

Delta Chat uses standard Android API to get location, so it should show the location which Surfshark VPN app emulates. Did you “attach” your location (it’s in the same menu as used to attach files, videos etc.)? If you simply opened the map, Delta Chat opens it at random location.

To share your location you need to select a chat and “attach” your location. Location is not shared by default. You are not required to stream your location to add markers to the map. So the features are already separate. Enabling “On-demand location streaming” setting does not do anything except adding a new type of attachment option and a “map” button.

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#5

@link2ex, OK, thanks for the explanation, I’ll try this again at next opportunity.