3 ms·

I'm curious about the battery and reliability effects of push notifications without FCM. Using a single service for notifications allows a single wakeup across

I'm curious about the battery and reliability effects of push notifications without FCM. Using a single service for notifications allows a single wakeup across the device when fetching notifications. Last I checked, the minimum interval for coalesced timers in android is 15m and that's just in time for most telco NATs in the US to have silently killed your connection. [Source: I used to run a 3P push network on android]

chrismartin 8y ago
In my totally subjective experience, the reduced power consumption of doing away with Google Spy Services exceed whatever background drain I've suffered with 3+ apps doing their own messaging for notifications. My phone (Moto G5 Plus) has been off the charger for over a day now and is still at 65% battery. As for reliability, I have notifications for email (using K9 Mail and IMAP idle), XMPP (Conversations), and Signal. Emails (using IMAP idle) always reach me within a second or so. Occasionally, Signal messages will take hours to reach me, but I suspect that's not a problem with the websocket connection to my phone, as others running Signal (on a Google-laden phone) have had the same issue.
lucb1e 8y ago
Well I'm not sure how Telegram does it, but I get messages pushed instantly, it doesn't use Google spy services for that, and it's super low in battery usage rankings. I might be wrong but isn't it simply about building a tcp connection whenever Internet is available or changes, and the server will push whenever there's something new? You don't need a single thing polling (which would indeed save power) if the server is pushing. Recently I learned that sleeping (power-conserving) clients are even part of the WiFi spec, so that an access point will hold onto messages for some time until the client is listening again. I assume this is just some ms, but still.

chrismartin 8y ago

In my totally subjective experience, the reduced power consumption of doing away with Google Spy Services exceed whatever background drain I've suffered with 3+ apps doing their own messaging for notifications. My phone (Moto G5 Plus) has been off the charger for over a day now and is still at 65% battery. As for reliability, I have notifications for email (using K9 Mail and IMAP idle), XMPP (Conversations), and Signal. Emails (using IMAP idle) always reach me within a second or so. Occasionally, Signal messages will take hours to reach me, but I suspect that's not a problem with the websocket connection to my phone, as others running Signal (on a Google-laden phone) have had the same issue.

lucb1e 8y ago

Well I'm not sure how Telegram does it, but I get messages pushed instantly, it doesn't use Google spy services for that, and it's super low in battery usage rankings. I might be wrong but isn't it simply about building a tcp connection whenever Internet is available or changes, and the server will push whenever there's something new? You don't need a single thing polling (which would indeed save power) if the server is pushing. Recently I learned that sleeping (power-conserving) clients are even part of the WiFi spec, so that an access point will hold onto messages for some time until the client is listening again. I assume this is just some ms, but still.