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[Bug/UX]: Notification sometimes gets stuck on "Listening" forever; consider removing notification entirely #171

Description

@hopsayer

App

Android app

What happened?

Notification occasionally hangs on "Listening" indefinitely; suggest removing it in favor of button-state indication`

Bug report (hard to reproduce on purpose)

Occasionally the system notification gets stuck showing "Listening" forever, even after recording has actually stopped and/or transcription has completed. I haven't been able to reliably reproduce this on demand, but it seems possibly related to quickly starting and stopping a recording — similar to the issue described in another report I filed (can't recall which one specifically). Not confirmed, just a suspicion based on timing.

Important clarification on the "hang": as far as I can tell, this is just the notification getting stuck — not the app freezing, and not the transcription process itself hanging. The recording/transcription pipeline appears to complete normally; it's specifically the notification UI that fails to update to reflect the actual state.

Broader suggestion: consider removing the notification altogether

Separately from the bug itself — I'd question whether this notification is even needed:

  • It's only visible for the short duration of recording + transcription, and in practice nobody really looks at it during that window.
  • The record button itself already changes state/animates to indicate what's happening (listening → transcribing → idle), which fully covers the "what's going on right now" role. The notification duplicates this.
  • The one thing the notification could uniquely provide — indicating a hang/freeze — turns out to be unreliable here, since (per the bug above) the notification itself is what hangs, not the actual process. So it doesn't even reliably serve that purpose.

Given all this, removing the notification (or at least not relying on it for state indication) might simplify things without losing real functionality.

How to reproduce

hard to reproduce on purpose

Phone and version

Pixel 5, Android 14, 0.1.0-beta.14

Redacted logs (optional)

Activity

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