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Comment by wiradikusuma | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of the project, but I'm curious.

Why would you need a self-hosted (or really, any other push-notif service) other than the official one from Apple/Goggle?

They're optimized (for each respective platform), no need to maintain a server, and free. If you need "cross-platform", you can use Firebase(?) that abstracts that away.

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Privacy? Keep in mind that not everyone intends to build a user-supporting platform on this tech. I like the concept because it's an easy way for me to push notifications from my homebrew IoT stuff and news streams without it flowing through ad companies.

You can encrypt notifications that go through Google's FCM and Apple's APNS push notification servers. This is how Pushover works - each notification is encrypted with a device-specific key, sent through the notification servers as an encrypted blob, then the app on the device is woken up and receives the blob, decrypts it, and posts it as a normal notification.

You could. But if you don't need that kind of added complexity and scale (and I don't for personal news updates or IoT device alerts) then why jump through those hoops?

I think the major reason this was created was for apps on the F-Droid store and for people who prefer not to have Google Play Services installed on their phone.

Consider that some countries do not have a reliable access to Google backend. The problem remains when trying to use notifications with a PWA. AFAICT, there's no way to set your own notification service in Chrome/Firefox/Safari.

Is it true that GCM is centralized and battery efficient, one push service per app will drain phones quickly? Or is that less of a concern nowadays?

It's still a concern and this service will increase battery drain - this is why all the users of apps using this service will have to explicitly exclude the apps from battery optimizations.

I don't see Google Play allowing these kind of apps in massive numbers though - applications abusing background processing to poll for messages were one of the main reasons why Android got blamed for being worse than iOS in standby battery consumption. Warranted or not, Google/Android gets blamed for abuse of power saving at the end.

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