[davecridland]

A device-global push protocol isn't entirely useless, since the device OS can wake all the clients at once if it needs to, synchronizing network activity. But I agree it's a significant overhead if you're able to just hold open the TCP session, as well as concentrating yet more information into a single entity you don't get to choose.

[inputmice]

Push messages on GCM are going through immediately. The push server is not queuing up messages to send them all at once. I admit that could be helpful but Google is not doing this either.

The alarm manager - where apps can schedule to be run at some point in the future - is in fact grouping those events together. But that happens entirely independent of GCM. The Alarm Manager is part of Android where as the push service is a proprietary Google service.

[davecridland]

Oh, okay - in that case I slouch corrected.