> the important features I actually want generally worked better 20 years ago than they do today 20 years ago, the only way to get proper push messaging on a p

> the important features I actually want generally worked better 20 years ago than they do today 20 years ago, the only way to get proper push messaging on a phone (other than SMS) was Blackberry with a special phone plan where the provider ran the push notification server. SMS still works fine. The situation for everything else has much improved. A central notifications server is kind of an unfortunate necessity - if each app would open its own TCP connection, all the keepalives would significantly increase radio wakeups and thus battery usage vs. a single optimized connection. You can still use IMAP Push like you could 20 years ago, the reason few people do is because of the extra power usage.