Showing a permanent notification icon is discouraged and many people's notification bar is incredibly cluttered with notification icons already. I'd like to raise the question whether we really need to show the icon to signal the user that she is signed into Briar at the moment.

The notification icon is shown for the app to run in the foreground and for preventing it from getting killed. However, we should experiment to see whether running in the foreground is definitely necessary. (It's more likely to be necessary on devices with less memory, so that's the place to test.)