Overview

In May 2025, a proposal to contribute a mobile inbox to the Open edX Mobile apps was shared with the community:Push Notifications in Mobile Apps. Milestone 1 (M1) of that proposal was approved; midway through the delivery of the M1 scope, the project was paused.

Since then, a web notifications inbox was introduced in Ulmo with additional features added for the Verawood release. This work did not exist when the original M1 was approved, as such, delivering M1 as originally defined is insufficient. Additional product and implementation details need approval to support a smooth rollout of the mobile inbox.

This proposal adds to the original M1 scope and includes implementation detail that should be approved before moving forward with development. Once approved, Schema plans to contribute M1 for Willow.

For additional details on context, and what has been delivered so far (prior to the project pause) see https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/x/FYAzgAE .

Revised Scope

Proposed M1 Scope

Notification Type Scope

The original scope covered only discussions related notifications. For the revised M1 scope, we propose adding all available notification types: Discussions, ORA, and Course Updates.

Discussion and Course Updates are straightforward: clicking the notification row navigates the learner to the relevant discussion or course update. For ORA, there are two notification types:

• ora_grade_assigned for learners: link to the ORA block so learner can see their grade

• ora_staff_notification for new learner submissions that are ready to be graded: link to a browser view of the ORA dashboard

Implementation Details

Notification Settings

Current user-visible settings in the platform are web, email, and push . Compared to an in-app inbox notification, push notifications have a significantly different disturbance impact on users. As such, we should reserve the push setting for true push notifications.

We suggest introducing a new in-app setting that replaces web and controls both web and mobile in-app tray notifications. The alternative is to introduce a mobile_inbox setting to have along with web. We do not suggest this route: adding a fourth notification setting adds too much to the settings and for users to have to distinguish.

Seen/ Read States

Seen and read state should be shared between web and mobile for both single and grouped notification rows.

For Approval

Future Milestones

Future milestones will require follow-on product proposals. We think the next milestone should be push notifications. We will create a new proposal once the M1 scope is delivered.