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Comment by Andrew_nenakhov | Hacker News Reader

A gentle reminder that on operating systems with crippled background functionality we, the users, need not only free and unrestricted sideloading, but also a third-party push notification services that are natively supported by the OS.

Or else your inactive email, chat or bank app will not be able to tell you that you have received something.

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IPv6 is getting fairly widely deployed on mobile networks. A server-less push mechanism could be designed using it.

If either Google or apple adopted this mechanism for push, mobile networks would adopt ipv6

I don't think IPv6 is going to be a good solution here. What do we do when the device joins another network and its address changes?

The OS would notify the app that its IP address has changed. The app can then send this new IP to its notification server, for future notification to arrive at the correct IP. No need for an Apple notification server here.

This would still require some cooperation from Apple, for the OS to receive the notifications and dispatch them when the app is not running. A long time ago, when there was no outrageously dominant players, the Internet industry would have produced an open communication protocol for this use case. Using the same protocol and the same notification server for both Android and iOS would be nice. Sadly, this is unlikely in today's Internet.

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