[izacus]

Except that push notifications also require work on telco's side to make sure they don't accidentally cause large battery use.

E.g. there was a long time after Apple introduced push messages where iPhone battery would drain pretty fast because many telcos would have very short connection timeouts on their routing equipment. This forced the phone to wakeup the radio a lot to reestablish connection.

This was "fixed" by whitelisting Apple/Google endpoints, so I wonder how that would work in federated environment.

[zozbot234]

> This forced the phone to wakeup the radio a lot to reestablish connection.

Perhaps, but if you can tolerate some latency, you might not have to wake the radio all that much. A huge majority of notification use cases can be delivered "late" (at least if the phone is in sleep mode) and still be useful.

[richardwhiuk]

Yes, and I believe both GCM and APNS perform cross-app notification coalescing, whereby a low priority notification (e.g. a news article, or some other content update) will picky-back on a high priority notification (incoming call, text message).

This is extremely valuable in reducing power usage.

(Notifications both exhibit radio usage, but also will typically turn on the display, which is a huge battery sink)