Microsoft wants to add incoming call notifications to Edge and is seeking your feedback

In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced a new proposal to allow web applications to send incoming call notifications via the Notifications API.

Microsoft wants to extend the Notifications API to support incoming call standards, allowing customization of incoming call buttons. Think of options like "Close" to dismiss the notification, "Audio" to answer the call in audio mode, or "Video" to switch to a video call.

The Notifications API, in its current state, does not let developers do certain things, such as making a notification high priority, associating a ringtone with a notification, or customizing the buttons that appear in a notification.

Under Microsoft's proposal, developers of VoIP applications can use the proposed "scenario" property in the existing options parameter to specify if a notification is an incoming call. The "scenario" property can accept two values: incoming-call and default, with the possibility of more scenarios like alarms and reminders.

A notification with an "incoming-call" scenario will naturally have a higher priority. Here's a picture Microsoft provided to illustrate how notifications could look on the web with Edge.

With this proposal, Microsoft aims to match what other platforms already offer for VoIP use cases. For example, on Android, there is a CallStyle notification template available starting from Android 12 (API level 31) that displays caller information prominently and provides actions like "Answer" and "Decline" for incoming calls. On iOS, CallKit allows VoIP apps to display incoming calls with the same interface as the native Phone app.

You might be concerned about potential abuse, and Microsoft has considered that as well. To mitigate ringtone abuse from web apps, Microsoft says the simplest solution is to disable notifications for that specific application. Ringtones, under Microsoft's proposal, will only be available in the Progressive Web App (PWA) version of a website.

If this sounds interesting to you, Microsoft wants your feedback on the proposal (you can do so by opening a new issue in this GitHub repository). In the meantime, here's how you can try out the feature in Edge before providing feedback.

1. Start Microsoft Edge on Windows from the command line with the following feature flag: msedge.exe --enable-features=IncomingCallNotifications.
2. Open the calls notification sample app.
3. Install the app on Windows, by clicking the App available button in the address bar.
4. When the app is installed and running, click the Permission button to accept notifications from the sample app.
5. Click the Show an incoming call notification button.

This request for feedback comes weeks after the company released Edge 132, bringing changes like an improved price tracker and important security fixes.

Source

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