I realized it might not be a good idea as the Sound icon may also be used in notification tray (when it's not expanded) to indicate sound is playing.

+rachelis@, what do you think?

I agree that using the Chrome icon makes sense when the tray is expanded, particularly in staying consistent with Play Music. 

That said, having the icon in the status bar will (hopefully) indicate that the user can find additional controls in the notification tray. For the Play Music icon, this is likely still be communicated, but for the Chrome icon it won't come across. I'd lean towards keeping it as is.

Thanks for the bug François. :)

Having a speaker icon in the status bar means (at least to me) that some audio is being played and that I should be able to turn it off or at least control it.

It does makes sense when audio is actually playing BUT since audio can also be paused, I think a product icon (such as Chrome logo) would make more sense.
See screenshots attached to illustrate my point of view.

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That feels like optimizing for the less common case. Plus - in order to get to the state you describe, the user needs to take an action (i.e. pause the media). 

I wouldn't say this is a less common case. We might want to add UMA for that ;)
 
User doesn't need to actually pause the media on Android.
Chrome will automatically be paused when web page loses audio focus (eg. phone call, another app playing audio, etc.)

rachelis@ see video in https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=678225#c8

I'd be open to adding the UMA if mounir has the time. :)

We already have metrics for this. There is slightly more click on the pause button than the play button. If we only count these two interactions, it's roughly 55% pause and 45% play.

Having a 🔊 speaker icon sitting in the notification tray while nothing is actually playing is quite weird. I'm not sure if it's because I'm playing too much with the Media Session API these days but this issue happened a lot to me.

// We already have metrics for this. There is slightly more click on the pause button than the play button. If we only count these two interactions, it's roughly 55% pause and 45% play.

The metric I'm interested in is how much time media with notifications is played vs paused.

//Having a 🔊 speaker icon sitting in the notification tray while nothing is actually playing is quite weird. I'm not sure if it's because I'm playing too much with the Media Session API these days but this issue happened a lot to me.

Hm - would it be possible for us to change this icon depending on the status of the media? (for example, show a paused icon when the media is paused)

I realised while having lunch that you indeed where probably expecting metrics on the notification being visible while playing or not, sorry :) Glad to see that my lunch realisation was correct ;)

Unfortunately, we don't have metrics on this. It's not a trivial metric to add too. We only hide the notification if the user dismisses it, closes the tab, or the page resetting its player, I think the notification is likely often visible while nothing is playing.

On Android, the notification tray usually shows an icon that matches the application that created the notification. I would like us in the future to use an icon that represents the website in order to have a better branding. In my opinion, for this to happen, we should also change the notification to something more generic than a speaker. Pretty much like other notifications work in Chrome: it shows a Chrome icon unless the website provided another icon.

FWIW, I think that the speaker is mostly the remains from another time where we used to show the notification only when a page was making sound: the notification would disappear as soon as the page would stop to make sound and there was no control over the playback. Things have changed a lot since but we never took another look at whether the badge was the right signal.

It might be interesting to look at Android guidelines here. Whether it is okay to have generic icons like this and whether we can change the icon depending on the playback state.

+dahlke@

I would expect that it's possible to change the icon, given that we change the download icon depending on the status. :)

All the arguments here are valid. On one hand, the standard is that most apps use their app logo as the icon for notifications. That would argue for us to use the Chrome logo. 

OTOH, some apps, including Android itself, use different icons to designate specific actions that are happening that users may be particularly interested in. The most canonical example is downloading. Android, Chrome, Play Music, Drive and others, all use the download icon instead of their app icon to designate a downloading function. Given the importance of media playback control and the different functionality that control provides vs. a "Chrome data saver mode saved you 4MB of data this month", I think it would be entirely warranted to use a distinct icon for this behavior. It would be correct to argue that no other apps do this, but media apps also are entirely known for media playback. Chrome provides far more extensive functionality and seeing a Chrome notification doesn't necessarily imply a media playback control.

Where I net out on this is that I think the speaker icon is the right approach. It clearly highlights the functionality that the notification provides and is a very recognizable and intuitive icon.

In the future we can and should look at optimizations to change the icon based on the state of the media, but for now, I propose that we take the simple approach and just use the existing icon.

Thoughts?

To be honest, I'm a bit confused with the download icon comparison. We have many media applications. A few of them being first party Google applications such as YouTube, Google Play Music and Google Play Movies which are probably better points of comparison. As an Android user, I've also always seen consistency with regards to media notifications on Android: apps show their icon, not the status of the playback.

For context, fbeaufort@, zqzhang@ and I want for the media notification that Chrome Android provides to be as close as possible to the one an application would create. In other words, soundcloud.com media notification and soundcloud application media notification should be as similar as we can. This "play" icon is going to be a problem for websites that want to bet an the best possible mobile web experience.

This said, I understand the concern of a Chrome notification being too generic. Though, do we agree that we could provide a way for websites to customise the icon that Chrome uses? so that soundcloud.com can have a soundcloud icon instead of a speaker one?

The download icon comparison comes from the download icon in Chrome. It's important that we maintain consistency with the other notifications in Chrome, not just media apps. 

//This said, I understand the concern of a Chrome notification being too generic. Though, do we agree that we could provide a way for websites to customise the icon that Chrome uses? so that soundcloud.com can have a soundcloud icon instead of a speaker one?

Yes, the genericness is an issue. The main difference that Jon and I identified is that media app icons are likely to be associated with *media*, whereas the Chrome icon is not. I could be open to this in the future, (though we should be conscious that there could be some complexity and therefore UX work) since users are likely to associate media product icons with media. Is this currently part of the proposal?

> Though, do we agree that we could provide a way for websites to customise the icon that Chrome uses? so that soundcloud.com can have a soundcloud icon instead of a speaker one?

Also note that it is not possible to customize the small icon using a Bitmap. It has to be a image resource.

zqzhang, with Android L+ (or is it M+?) we can use a bitmap. We would have to use WebAPK only if we want to target all versions ofr Android.

rachelis@, it's not something we mean to launch with the API but something we have in our radar. It would be a very nice polish for media websites that want to bet on PWA on the mobile web.

OK, thanks Mounir! Would you mind filing a separate tracking bug so we don't lose.. track of it? :)

> zqzhang, with Android L+ (or is it M+?) we can use a bitmap. We would have to use WebAPK only if we want to target all versions ofr Android.

Your are right. It is M+:
https://developer.android.com/reference/android/graphics/drawable/Icon.html#createWithBitmap(android.graphics.Bitmap)

I guess https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=680431 is the existing bug we should use then.

Ah, that's right. Thanks!

I think we can go ahead and close this then. Please reopen if you disagree. :)