Hi! New user here so I’m apologizing in advance if I’m in the wrong section.
At least once a week I get a random Toast telling me F-Droid couldn’t resolve a host. I’m on version 1.23.2 and it shows up randomly when i unlock my phone. I suspect this could be from various reasons as the site being temporarily down or I’m on a network with a bad DNS. From a user perspective, I have no way of fixing this and it could very well be a temporary thing that will solve itself without my help.
So why a Toast for this? It pops up regardless of what I’m doing (in any app), it blocks a part of my screen for a few seconds and I can’t interact with it. I think that’s okay for simple messages such as “Downloading…” or “Success!”, but not for an error I can’t do anything about.
Suggestion
Don’t use a Toast for temporary network failures. Log them instead, and only tell me if it keeps happening, for example as a Snackbar the next time I open F-Droid.
If you want to take it further, the same idea could be a small severity system:
- Severity 1: Notification. Something urgent has happened and the user needs to be informed with actions
- Severity 2: Silent notification. Something went wrong during a background process that needs user interaction for a permanent fix. A temporary host resolve fail does not apply for this.
- Severity 3: Log, but no notification. The event is logged and only if enough events of the same character are logged, they show up as a Snackbar when you open F-Droid.
I just honestly think that Toasts should be avoided for things the user can’t fix.