It's a huge problem for both privacy and the open source ecosystem that Apple and Google mandate use of their own notification system for apps to be included in their stores.
https://github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS/blob/mas...
I doubt it solves much but I like to think of it as a little poke in the eye.
Not to mention that people might prefer to use some more battery in exchange for more privacy
It’s possible that a better interface could be developed but it wouldn’t help privacy unless the implementers were in different legal jurisdictions: the same government which can subpoena or NSL Apple or Google could’ve asked e.g. Urban Airship for the same details. There’s also a challenge in that each implementation is a chance to make mistakes or fail to deliver promised privacy protections, and someone in a country which isn’t the United States might have stronger privacy laws but is also a legitimate NSA target. This kind of problem just doesn’t have simple solutions.
Before the platform notifications every single app kept their own connections open; allowing (completely) third part notification platforms would have a small or non-existent impact
I’m not sure this is true: a small company is less likely to have the legal resources or confidence to stand up for their customers’ rights. I’m sure you could find examples going either way at either size.
Being in a different country helps but only if the company has sufficient security to even notice if the NSA decides to take advantage of them being outside of the US. I would bet Apple and Google have that level of expertise but not everyone else.
Btw, here's the telegram team complaining about the change: https://github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS/blob/mas...
Facebook abused this a bunch. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/01/uninstall...
And you can simply offer more battery controls, rather than general not overridable rules
It's more problematic that some Android "skins" tend to kill background applications at random https://dontkillmyapp.com/, but at least, one cannot squarely blame Google for that one...
The "battery life" argument that that they constantly use is also a very poor excuse. Even when Conversations (the Jabber client) didn't use push notifications at all and would just listen on noisy XMPP sockets, it still had about the lowesst power consumption of all Android messaging programs, lower than Google's own push notifications client app (play services).
Certainly I might imagine that if all 1,000 adware apps your average Android user installs all needed to be wired and listening to a socket in order to receive the latest offers (all in the legitimate interest of the user, of course) you might literally run out of memory. But even then there are many solutions (such as inetd like services) that do not require centralizing everything into Google.
...I'm not even clear on what they're complaining about (the page github links to seems to have been changed, it describes the current state rather than what happened in 8), because this was actually a thing as far back as Android 2: you had to have one of those notifications up to prevent Android from killing your service.
Additionally, Alarms and Broadcast Listeners were seriously crippled which made common workarounds much harder.