litphoria

Details and sample implementation

Litphoria's chat runs perfectly well at least on Android Chrome (v53, Android 5.0) and likely other HTML5-compliant mobile browsers (it does not, in general, appear to work on stock Android browsers). It would be useful if all audible notifications produced by the chat could also trigger vibrations, where hardware support exists (according to the above, detecting the capability is reasonably trivial).

I've had plenty of Android-based chat clients do it, and since none exist for Litphoria at present, this looks like the best way.

Most often I've seen these APIs used improperly, such as with ads attempting to scam you by suggesting that you have a virus on your Android device. I was just as surprised as anyone to discover that any old web page can send a vibrate command to your phone without any prompting or permission.

While I think this might be a good idea, I'm almost certain this will be considered bad practice as soon as this technique catches on. It seems a bit like the old "Full screen mode" browsers used to have that could trap you in an advertisement.

Then don't make it mandatory? If it's disabled be default, it's nothing more than a capability, made useful by those who actually want to make use of it. The difference between a fullscreen advertisement trap and a vibration option, aside from only one of the two having the capability to actually interfere with your ability to close the window, is exactly around user consent.