Surely you mean fixed, not broken, as absolutely no one should be delivering information silently to a device they don't own.
That's a very very very shallow thinking. You are advocating to break the internet. You are destroying every internet protocol that ever existed. They all silently deliver information to devices you likely don't own.
Actually, we wouldn't need these dirty perversions with notifications if we had a proper background mode for apps. Like, you know, proper computers had for maybe 60 years.
It's worth noting, however, that desktop and laptop PCs have a surplus of energy relative to mobile phones, so it's no big deal if there's a bunch of processes running in the background doing their thing… usually, anyway, because on PCs it's also shockingly common for background processes to misbehave and consume far more resources than they have any right to. Point in case, the daemon for my Logitech mouse will sometimes consume 120% CPU for no apparent reason for extended periods if I allow it to run.
I could see an argument for extending background capabilities in iOS while also heavily also reducing their potential for bad behavior, though. For example, allowing apps to run in the background indefinitely, but on low power cores only with heavily capped CPU and memory consumption, along with a new Settings page that shows a list of persistent background processes and gives the user direct control over them.
I quickly checked Activity Monitor and Dropbox was not responding and using huge amounts of CPU. Yeah. This is a problem.
I had hoped they fixed that...
Android doesn't have anything like it either. It's my number 1 complaint about smartphone experience ever since I bought my first one: the phone actively refuses to give user insight and control over what's running on their device.
Uh, it sure does through the applications section. You can see running services, which ones are taking battery, and stop/disable those as well.
Contrast that with e.g. the task manager on Windows. It's not a pinnacle of UI, but it's easy to use, communicates necessary information, and gets the job done.
If battery power is universally plentiful, you'll get something of a road expansion effect where developers simply take advantage of cheap power and bloat apps to fill the added capacity, returning you to square one with phones struggling to last a day.
So with that in mind, the best case scenario may be for manufacturers to keep their current thin models but also introduce new ultra-high-capacity models, so apps are optimized reasonably well and users can take full advantage of the extra capacity.
Story time: Years ago the Signal app would silently wake up in the background, upload 20MB+ of my contacts’ photos, and then shutdown and do it all over again every time I received a silent notification. Due to my membership in a few large groups this was very often. The result was gigabytes of cellar data usage in a week.
Fortunately my experience was rare because I both had a lot of contacts with photos and I ran the desktop app. But it was infuriating to track down and it made me realize that silent wake ups were even possible on iOS. (Or used to be)
I don’t know what the right balance is, but I think there should be some middle ground.
So, no, nothing 'improved' in your Signal experience. At least, not yet.
All developers are equal, but some are more equal than others.
On top of that, the partner support you used to get from Microsoft if you were a developer they cared about was orders of magnitude more helpful and useful than what you’d get if you weren’t a preferred partner.
Linux, you’re more correct I’d think.
I quite like this particular viewpoint. I’m stealing this philosophy for the next time I am designing a CLI.