Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Not a criticism of Zulip, but it'd be nice if "push notification" services in general went away.

Mobile devices used to work well enough, without needing an extra server over the Internet involved in notifying the user of something they cared about. And battery and processor technology has advanced a lot since then.

On my current handheld, I like the Internet bandwidth and latency, and I like the OpenStreetMaps-based app, but otherwise... the important features I actually want generally worked better 20 years ago than they do today (and didn't feel like everything was designed to shovel garbage at me, and spy on me).

If these platforms had been designed for privacy and security, and to serve the user rather than exploit them, I think they would be very different by now, including not needing "push notifications".

> the important features I actually want generally worked better 20 years ago than they do today

20 years ago, the only way to get proper push messaging on a phone (other than SMS) was Blackberry with a special phone plan where the provider ran the push notification server.

SMS still works fine. The situation for everything else has much improved.

A central notifications server is kind of an unfortunate necessity - if each app would open its own TCP connection, all the keepalives would significantly increase radio wakeups and thus battery usage vs. a single optimized connection. You can still use IMAP Push like you could 20 years ago, the reason few people do is because of the extra power usage.

I appreciate very much the push notifications for emails and IMs. For one, they rid the email and IM apps from having to periodically wake up and poll their servers.

AFAICT the way push notifications (and SMS) work allows them to be received just by the baseband processor which listens to the radio transmissions at a very low power. So, until a notification comes, the whole app processor may safely sleep, saving a ton of power.

Or we could've had other power management designs by now.

No big mobile platform vendor has any interest in tearing down their garden walls :-(

I feel like the engineering required could even be pretty simple, but in status quo everybody makes more money.

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