Well, it's understandable that many apps want to run as a regular process. Good old UNUX was and it's GNU/Linux descendants are quite OK with it. The users have control and can choose which apps to run and which not. If some app misbehaved, it was up to a user to identify it and remove a problem.

But Google decided that it will be our nanny and will guard all users against misbehaving apps, whether the users asked about it, or not, and you can't refuse this care. That is tyranny and should be fought against.

Now, I don't think that push notifications are bad. They are rather good idea and let them be. It is the monopoly on push notifications which is bad.

> How do you have open app stores and not have them filled with malware?

Long before the 'app store' term was coined, Linux had software repositories, which worked like magic, and without issues:

    sudo aptitude install libreoffice 

Boom, you now have libreoffice on your PC! If repositories had massive problems with malware, I'm not aware of them. So it was done decades ago and can be done again.