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Comment by ath92 | Hacker News Reader

Regular users don’t think of push notifications as something that needs to go through some central server owned by Apple. If Alice sends Bob a message, shouldn’t that require only their phones to communicate with one another, without some third party?

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This would mean, that every app notification needs to contact a different server. Lets say you have 20 Apps that send notifications. 20 different connections would work in the background to fetch updates instead of 1.

Privacy vise this is an issue and the reason that messangers like signal and matrix would use their own services on android. However this reduced battery runtime by a good margin and android and ios get more aggressiv at killing background tasks each os iteration.

To make things worse, push notifications for matrix and signal where unrealiable, because manufacturers like oneplus, oppo and some others where killing all the background tasks against specification to win the influencer battery tests.

In the Alice and Bob scenario, what happens if Bob’s phone is off or doesn’t have a single when Alice sends the message? Does the message just get dropped? Does Alice’s phone keep trying forever to send the message until it gets a response back that Bob got it? How long does it try before giving up? What happens if Alice and Bob are far apart and the phones can’t directly talk, how does Alice in LA send a message to Bob in NY without a 3rd party to relay the message?

If regular users don’t think about these things, it’s because they’ve never thought about these ideas at all. If they did, and they are able to think, they should come to the conclusion that a 3rd party is necessary in some form.

But how would they make sure that conversation is safe and approved if it isn’t monitored?

(/s for those who need it)

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