> An alternative is requiring developers to engage with the community and convince them there’s no ill intent. This is a pretty tough alternative. No developer

> An alternative is requiring developers to engage with the community and convince them there’s no ill intent. This is a pretty tough alternative. No developer is going to say "I have ill intent here"; are you confident you have the ability to make that decision on your own? I'm not confident I do. I can't look at the code of most of the stuff I run on my phone. Some people would say "then stick to all open source software," but I don't have the time or expertise to audit the code of all -- or even most -- of the applications I run. Maybe other people will, but there's no guarantee they'll find anything bad (whether malicious or just buggy) very quickly -- and we're talking about cloud stuff here, which means there's a server none of us can audit involved in the process. Apple and Google having "blessed" push notification systems is certainly a tradeoff on multiple levels, from it being a single point of failure to being another server you can't audit and a single company you have to trust to at least some limited degree. But having the notifications integrated at the OS level reduces the number of people and systems involved in delivering those notifications, at least theoretically reducing the number of bad actors -- and, as many people have observed here, also lets these notifications be optimized for battery life in a way that's probably not possible if you have dozens of apps running their own background processes rather than simply asking to be notified by the system one. The alternatives are a different set of tradeoffs. That doesn't necessarily make them worse, but it definitely doesn't automatically make them better. > And where is the option for those of us who don’t mind less battery in exchange for actually getting prompt notifications for services we use? The alternate scenarios give you less battery, but don't guarantee actually getting prompt notifications for services you use, do they? They just give you different points of failure. Actually, they might even give you the same points of failure. When a DoorDash notification shows up on my iPhone late -- or as it did the other day, inexplicably 20 minutes early, leaving me standing in Silicon Valley's smoke-filled air quizzically looking for my chicken order -- is that Apple's fault, or is it DoorDash's fault? After all, the notification isn't starting on Apple's server. If the problem is with DoorDash, which the early notification had to be, then if DoorDash could bypass Apple's notification system all that would give me is an incorrect notification delivered with fewer network hops.