The new GreenCharge App has an interesting feature where they use the badge icon as an indication of %SOC. The example picture below represents a 75% SOC.

It is an interesting approach, that I'm not sure if we should adopt. Hence, discussion:

  1. I personally don't like badge icons. They scream 'attend to me! clean me up!' and my OCD kicks in ;-) I like to keep inbox=0. There would be no way to 'clear' such a badge icon.

  2. I'm not sure if this violates Apple's user interface guidelines and/or would be enough to get rejected from the App store. More research would be needed on this.

  3. Implementation wise, it is trivial. At the server level, if SOC != lastSOC then send a PUSH notification with a new badge number = SOC%. This would only work for non-paranoid mode cars. If we wanted this to work with paranoid-mode cars, we would need to do it at the car module level with a new message type (unencrypted SOC).

  4. Easy to make it opt in/out - just enable/disable badge icons in the iPhone preferences (Settings/Notifications/OpenVehicles).

Thoughts?

Mark.

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