NotifBot: Android app to forward notifications to Telegram bot
In my last blog post, I discussed why do I need Android Auto compatible SmartThings notifications, and why my attempt, AutoNotif, was rejected by Google Play because of Android Auto nofication policies.
After the rejection, I decided to use Telegram bot instead, because Telegram's Android app has very good Android Auto support, and Telegram itself has a very good bot platform.
The result is NotifBot: an Android app with a Telegram bot. It's an open source project released under BSD license
The Android app was written in Scala. It's mostly the same as the previous app, AutoNotif, just changed sending direct Android Auto notifications into sending Telegram messages.
The Telegram bot was written in Go, running on Google App Engine. It handles both Telegram's webhook and Android app's requests to forward the message. All connections are encrypted using HTTPS, and on the client side there are basic token authentication, and the token is revocable anytime with /stop Telegram command. I used Cloud Datastore for persistent storage (telegram token, user tokens).
In order to keep it under AppEngine's free tier for as long as possible, I chose the standard environment, which has some weird restrictions on Go (e.g. only has Go 1.6, has AppEngine specified APIs for Datastore, etc.). But in the end that's not a really big problem.
Please give it a try, and send me feedbacks.
