When groups are deleted, custom notification settings are left in place and cannot be removed

[TARehman]

• I have searched open and closed issues for duplicates
• I am submitting a bug report for existing functionality that does not work as intended
• I have read https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/wiki/Submitting-useful-bug-reports
• This isn't a feature request or a discussion topic

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Bug description

If you have previously set up a custom notification rule for a group, and subsequently deleted the group, Android continues to display the custom notification rule in the Conversations section, or in Notifications for the app if you have told Android something is not a conversation.

It is not possible to remove these because there is no entry in Signal to edit, making it impossible to remove these. This issue persists through uninstalling and reinstalling Signal when backups are restored. If group names contain sensitive information, they can be seen without opening the app in this manner.

I explored this through some testing tonight, by doing the following:

• uninstalling and installing the app a few times with backup and restore;
• inspecting the contents of the backup using https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools, and confirming that for every group that showed up in the Android UI, the notification_channel value was not NULL in the recipients table in SQLite, and;
• removing custom notification rules for groups I had not deleted, which made them disappear from the Android UI.

It is possible this would also affect messages with an individual; I did not check that use case.

Steps to reproduce

• Create a new group in Signal.
• Set a custom notification rule for it using triple dot, "Group settings" ,"Sounds & notifications", "Custom notifications".
• Validate that you can see the new rule by either looking at the app Notification settings (long press, app info, "Notifications") or in the Conversations section (Settings -> Notifications -> Conversations).
• Delete the group you created.

Actual result: After deletion, the custom notification rule will remain visible in the Android UI.
Expected result: When a group is deleted, any custom notification rules for that group disappear from the UI.

Screenshots

I already have a number of these phantom groups so I didn't want to create more just for testing. However, here's a screenshot. These groups all show up in Android, but only one is a group I still have and have not deleted.

Device info

Device: Google Pixel 8
Android version: 14
Signal version: 7.17.5

Link to debug log

Again, I did not want to create another phantom group that I could not delete unless absolutely necessary, but if it is needed, I can do so.