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Comment by joecool1029 | Hacker News Reader

>Apps can't just send notifications?

They can but consider this: How would they know to send them?

If you are adding a provider only locally there's no way for the app to know to generate a notification if it doesn't have an IMAP idle connection open constantly or scheduled polling. If the app is shipped by the email provider (like gmail app for ios using a gmail account) they can send pushes without leaving connection open or polling.

The point of having your details with the app developer is that their servers will remain always connected to your email provierr and generate pushes that will go over Apple or Google's push network.

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I can see it making sense if you're already using the mail servers of the company that made the app (gmail for example) since they already have unrestricted access to your login info and mailbox anyway.

I guess otherwise I'd rather it be my phone regularly polling my mail server over my connection than a third party regularly polling it using theirs. I can see it being a popular option for folks on expensive/very limited data plans though. It doesn't take a ton of bandwidth to poll a mail server, but checking every 5-10 minutes it could add up.

the OS won't let you do that reliably unless the user also keeps opening the app. background processing is heavily limited for the right reasons.

iOS does that, maybe, but Android doesn’t. The mail client I use on my Android phone notifies me in a timely fashion when new mail arrives, often in less than a second. It just uses IMAP’s IDLE command to wait for new mail. If the connection drops it can just open a new one.

"Android doesn't"

Does it occur to you that there are so many different variants of Android and they all do their own thing regarding background processes? It is so complicated that you can find websites like this https://dontkillmyapp.com/

That’s a fair point; I hadn’t realized how bad certain brands could be. The last Samsung phone I owned was from about 10 years ago, and it worked just fine. I replaced it with a Google Pixel last year when the 3G networks started getting shut down, and it works great too.

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