Making your own push system on Android is rather unreliable. On phones from several brands (Samsung, for one) the system would constantly try to kill any long-r

Making your own push system on Android is rather unreliable. On phones from several brands (Samsung, for one) the system would constantly try to kill any long-running polling operation or background refresh daemon. I don't really see their point about device IDs, though. There are ways around that, from cryptography to on-device filtering. It's also not like Apple isn't storing device IDs to send these push messages. There's no difference to user privacy. All of that said, by leaving it up to Apple to keep track of device IDs, they're not going to be on the hook for warrants. The government can get that data from Apple instead, but they can claim innocence. It's CYA.