I have come across this question by many of our readers on Twitter and other places and many of you are eager to know about how the toast notifications work in Windows Phone 8.1. Some fear it won’t work, some say for everything one will have to open action center. So, here are some details from Windows Phone 8.1 page for developers, which reveals the whole idea. So, by default Toast notifications will pop-up for user to tap, but in case user doesn’t acknowledge, after few seconds it disappears and then can be accessed in “Action center”. If user already taps the pop-up, it won’t appear in Action center.
By default, when you send a toast notification, a pop-up UI containing the contents of the notification is displayed to the user. If the user taps on the pop-up, they are brought to your app where you can then show them more information relevant to the notification. This notification is deemed to have been acknowledged by the user and will not show up in action center. If the user does not tap the pop-up, it disappears automatically after a few seconds.
Devs can however use a “supressPopup” method to directly send apps toasts to notification center without displaying a pop-up to user. So, when user opens the action centre, he will see both “missed” as well as “directly sent to action center” toasts.
When the user opens action center, they’ll see a list of missed notifications for your app. This list includes toast notifications they dismissed from the UI, toasts that displayed as a pop-up UI that they didn’t see or act upon and toasts that were sent directly to the action center without showing a pop-up UI. They can tap the notification in action center and be brought to your app for further context.
Also, 20 is the number of toasts, one app can sow up in Action center. So, if there are already 20 toast in action center, the next incoming toast will make the oldest notification to disappear making the total number 20 again.
The number of toast notifications that can be shown in action center for an app is 20. Each app has its own queue in action center that is managed by the system on a first in, first out (FIFO) basis. When you send a new toast notification and you already have 20 notifications in action center, the oldest notification is removed from the queue and the newest is added. The system also shows a More Notifications message, to inform the user that they have missed more notifications from this app. Tapping on this message launches your app.
