Google Cast Notifications are Broken for Apps Targeting Android Oreo, Google Promises a Fix
Google Cast is the service that Android uses to stream to a Chromecast. It allows you to put what’s on your phone on a bigger and better screen so that everyone can see. When streaming to a Chromecast, a notification will pop up allowing you to control many aspects of media playback, such as track skipping. You can also stop, pause or mute from the notification. On Android Oreo, however, any apps targetting SDK26 (Android Oreo), will have some broken functionality when it comes to using Google Cast.
On Android Oreo, if the application you are using targets SDK26, then you will not receive the notification giving you options to control the device. There is a relatively simple explanation as to why it happens, and it’s due to the Android Oreo changes to notifications. Android Oreo introduced notification channels, a requirement for applications to include when building for Android Oreo. The Google Cast SDK notification builder does not use notification channels so the system does not allow it to create notifications. As a workaround, for now, app developers are targetting their applications for SDK25 instead. This does mean though that any Android Oreo specific features introduced in SDK26 are unusable for developers which need working Google Cast functionality.
Thankfully, the issue was reported on the Android issue tracker, marked as fixed and is promised to work properly in future Android versions. If you are an app developer using the Google Cast SDK, it’s recommended for now that you do not build for SDK26 or else you will run into the same issues. Build for SDK25 if you can, as it is the only way to fix the issue. There is no way to fix it yourself. It’s possible that we’ll see Android 8.1 soon, so it should be publicly fixed soon.
0 comments:
Post a Comment