Hacker News Reader

Comment by MattJ100 | Hacker News Reader

Conversations has supported Google push notifications since 2016, long before Android started getting more aggressive about battery optimizations.

It's been a standard feature of XMPP mobile apps for as long as it's been necessary.

View on HN

These are surely not purely client-side XMPP... clients, though? In order for you to receive push notifications, some server somewhere is connecting as you in order to relay the messages through GCM.

No need for a relay. The actual XMPP servers nowadays support GCM natively. The client generates a GCM token and just hands that to the XMPP server. The server doesn't have to send actual message content either, it can just be a "wake up, there's a new message" ping the app can handle specially.

Even if you send the wake up. You can't open an xmpp connection in the background

There is an XMPP standard for asking your own server to send "new message" pings via a GCM proxy. Nothing has to "connect as you".

Server pings are almost useless in dozemode.

I know. But they had to resort to a not-so-pretty foreground service to get around battery optimisations. Do you call that a good user experience?

Many apps do that, it allows the app to stay connected which (perhaps counter-intuitively) is more efficient for realtime apps. It's entirely optional though, and even if the app has such a notification it can be hidden. On some ROMs however, even the notification does not suffice and the app gets killed anyway. Thanks to push notifications, it still works.

In any case, this is the choice of a specific implementation, and not something inherent to XMPP. Your original comment said that integration with Firebase was needed, and I wanted to point out that it is already integrated.

More on the app-killing ROMs can be found at https://dontkillmyapp.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com