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Comment by orblivion | Hacker News Reader

> There's no decentralized way to get a push notification onto a Google/Android phone

What is a "push notification" exactly?

A notification delivered “by” a phone application when that application is not necessarily running.

They’re “notifications” in common speech but there’s also stuff like “now playing” and live activities and rich content that are also “notifications” but do require the app to run.

That's not really what I mean. The person I was replying to was saying that I can't get push notifications without Google's centralized stuff. ntfy/UnifiedPush appears to do just that, so I'm wondering what is missing here.

They are doing that by polling private servers, which is sometimes less efficient power-wise, and sometimes notifications are being delivered slower than in case of using Google-provided mechanism (FCM). We've been using ntfy for alerting, using our private server and running ntfy client in polling mode, and I do not see significantly increased battery usage by the ntfy client; Android 15.

So ntfy Android app polls a ntfy service. (Which is more efficient than each app polling separately) What does Google's Android library do if not also poll? Does it run a server on the phone? Does it get special signals from cell towers that most apps don't have access to?

It also polls, it just does it as part of the OS. Power saving by the OS can often interfere with apps like nfty that want a long-running background process, especially if they haven’t been opened in a while.

Okay, thank you.

From what you're saying, it doesn't sound like the OS-based polling would be more power efficient, as someone in this chain suggested, just more reliable. Though, I think you can just turn off battery optimization for the ntfy app, in which case I'd expect them to be on par.

If that's right, it seems like ntfy with battery optimization turned off is effectively a "real" push notification system.

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