[toast0]

From my perspective, everything you want to see in the app when you next open it, should be transfered to your phone when you have network access; because you might not have access when you open the app. There's lots of things that fit in there -- read receipts, group changes, profile photo changes, contacts that join or leave the network.

Not user visible (mostly), but still important are things like end to end key changes and key cycling related to group changes.

Disclaimer: I used to work for a messaging company.

[GeekyBear]

As far as I'm concerned, if reading an incoming message in a notification doesn't motivate me to open your app, then all of those housekeeping tasks can wait until I do open your app.

Respect the battery life of my device.

[pmart123]

My exceptions would be financial market apps and news apps. I might also throw podcast apps in this group to selectively download typically viewed shows or topics.

[pdimitar]

Disagreed.

I don't want apps working in the background. If I want to see what changed in an app, I'll open it and I expect it to request the changes then and only then. If I have no network then I'll see no changes. Easy.

Your perspective is very foreign to me and definitely seems hostile to the battery life of my device.

[toast0]

I want to be able to message with people while I (and they) have intermittent coverage. I live in an area with poor cell coverage, and it's difficult to use messengers that require me to be online while the app is open if I'm on the bus or the ferry. The worst is those that show notifications with partial messages, but then I can't read the whole message, because I'm in a dead zone.

SMS doesn't require me to have the app open while I have a working connection, and an SMS replacement shouldn't either.

But --- I think your perspective is reasonable too; there's a tradeoff here: offline experience, battery (maybe --- if you're going to get and process everything anyway, there is a difference in processing it in small batches vs one big batch, but it might not be that big), server visibility into types of messages, etc. Most phone OSes have a battery saver mode that disables background processing, so you can force this, but I personally disable that for the apps I want to work offline.

[joshuamorton]

> Your perspective is very foreign to me and definitely seems hostile to the battery life of my device.

Not if the OS manages the batching of those updates. Then it's barely any more hostile than what the OS needs to do to manage things like receive phone calls.

I think you're also strongly in the minority on this. People who use messaging apps prefer the ability to get notified (at least sometimes) when they get a message, even an unexpected one. That true for phone calls, texts, emails, or Whatsapp/signal/fbm etc.

[GeekyBear]

Message notification is not impacted here. You don't need to open the full app for that to happen.

If the app uses encrypted messages, you just have to write an extension to handle the decryption on device while the app is not running.

If the user wants to interact further after reading the message notification, they open the full app.

[jbverschoor]

Indeed. I disabled background app refresh, and I don’t want apps to abuse certain features to do thing I don’t want them to do.

I kicked out zoom and adobe permanently for the same reason

[scarface74]

Background app refresh on iOS is one of the few features that Apple automatically allows but you can disable on an app by app basis.

[pdimitar]

And I did. That's not related to my parent commenter's point, I think.

[scarface74]

Apple has had “Background App Refresh” for a while now.