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Comment by teknopaul | Hacker News Reader

Afaik Google and Apple just discount their own poller. It still has to wake up and check periodically.

They have special deals with the telcos that TCP connections to their servers can have longer TTLs. Plus of course, even if you do polling, if you have 5 different apps that connect every 10 minutes to their own respective services with different offsets, you have the device waking up every 2 minutes, with a potential latency of up to 10 minutes for each individual service. If it uses a central push service, you can set it to 5 minutes, the device would therefore wake up less than half of the time, and maximum latency would be 5 minutes, not 10.

Thus, it makes total sense to have one mechanism for push messages for the entire device. It's great to have degoogled alternatives here.

> Plus of course, even if you do polling, if you have 5 different apps that connect every 10 minutes to their own respective services with different offsets, you have the device waking up every 2 minutes,

This is now impossible with background execution restraints set in Oreo. The OS clusters requests for background execution and does them with the same wake. Apps can only wake the device every 15 minutes at most (and requests to wake are not guaranteed).

> This is now impossible with background execution restraints

Signature spoofing is similarly "impossible" there's no rule saying this stuff can't be changed by distributions that care about it. You already have to install a custom OS to get rid of gapps to begin with so aside from the maintenance burden for changes that will never get upstreamed this is really a nonissue.

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