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Comment by cudder | Hacker News Reader

My main gripe with any non-WhatsApp chat app on Android is the same: notifications never "just work". I don't know if it's just my Samsung or what, but I can't get Telegram or Signal to reliably deliver notifications to me when they are closed or in the background, only when I open the app.

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Yeah that's samsungs fault, check https://dontkillmyapp.com for explanation and workarounds (if they exist). I regularly want to bang my head against a wall because phone manufacturers seem to be really uncomfortable permitting anything with less than a billion users in the background while having their own bloat run restriction free.

Signal itself also has a long dedicated documentation page to help users prevent their phone from throttling it: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007318711-Tr...

I presume these manufacturers allowlist WhatsApp by default. Hopefully Signal getting more popular will help it in that department.

Depending on the specific apps it is usually that it is not using GCM/FCM (something like Conversations) or that the battery manager is very aggressive and Whatsapp is whitelisted by default (because so many use it).

For Samsung I think it is the latter, since many apps have the same problem on Samsung.

I wonder why this is so it or why it could be so on Android. Notifications are/should be handled by the OS (mainly to conserve battery) and then handed over to a lean piece of the application for display and any immediate actions. I’ve never had issues with notifications on iOS, but would like to understand how the Android app model is different.

You should look at "Optimising battery usage" in the the application settings for Samsung. WhatsApp is likely whitelisted to prevent this behaviour, I imagine in time Signal will be as well.

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