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Comment by bstsb | Hacker News Reader

the author has specified why, in a pretty detailed post about it (https://www.iceblock.app/android). they quote your exact concern as the reason they only support Apple:

> Apple’s ecosystem allows for push notifications to be sent without requiring us to store any user-identifiable information.

edit: however, GrapheneOS disputes this: https://bsky.app/profile/grapheneos.org/post/3lswujex4e22w

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iOS dev but not expert in how push notifications are implemented but confused by this claim, both platforms you need a device specific token because? of course you do? I feel like I am missing something

Right? I'm confused how APNS could do this differently from FCM. At least an Android app could implement push notifications without involving Google. This seems like a dev that doesn't really understand Android outside of the GMS features.

I checked and apparently, Apple supports broadcast channels for push. The app only stores the channel information and Apple stores the mapping of devices to channels. So while Apple still has the data, the dev does not.

Aha that makes some sense: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/... that is new with iOS 18, happy to be wrong, thanks for the follow up. Even less familiar with Android but assuming then the dev means you need a token at least currently to send a push through fcm and therefore could be compelled by law enforcement to give up the tokens. Apple of course could be compelled but that is a higher bar.

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