[oneplane]

But why is it a problem that the app must be running to decrypt the silent notification? The user doesn't know about it and won't know about it until the app is opened, but then the app is already open and can process the notifications.

As a user I really would not care if the 'read receipt' or 'is typing' notification is unavailable to an app while I'm not using it anyway. And when I'm using it, I don't see a problem with the app having to process some notifications in a different thread and update the UI accordingly.

[saagarjha]

The complaint is that that the server now needs to know the difference between the types of messages passing through it.

[oneplane]

Well yes, but that's only the case if the app insists on communicating this type of data using the background push api.