[actuator]

Sorry, not familiar with Android core. For your example, how would it work without proprietary technologies? AFAIK, Android uses GCM for notifications. Adding integrations for it don't seem to make much sense in core open source Android as that will make you tied to Google's ecosystem.

[LukeShu]

Because I don't have Google's services on my phone, I have two always-visible notifications that never go away:

"Telegram" / "Push service: tap to learn more" (tapping opens https://github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS/blob/mas...)

"Signal" / "Background connection enabled"

Both are serving the same purpose, for different apps. Even before we get to network connections and servers (the things that might make sense to be proprietary), without Google's ecosystem the local side has a bad UX and requires hacks.

[lern_too_spel]

That is just because they are not using something like https://bubu1.eu/openpush/ and instead implementing their own push services. This is not a problem with Android but with the apps.

[jmnicolas]

I was speaking about _local_ notifications, not push: some clock / reminder apps never fire notifications or way too late. I think it's because the OS aggressively shutdown apps running in background.

[dingaling]

IMAP Idle works fine for e-mail so long as Android doesn't kill the background process. No need for proprietary service.

[zepto]

An open platform would have a framework that supports multiple back ends.

[actuator]

This would be definitely nice to have but why does core Android itself need to have support for every feature?

We can have open source OSs on top of Android that build with a specific service set. Sort of how Ubuntu builds over Debian.

[zepto]

It doesn’t have to do anything, but if it doesn’t support what are considered standard features of a phone today in an open manner, it’s hard to take AOSP seriously as an open platform.

Also worth noting that when someone does build on top of AOSP, they are at the mercy of Google’s roadmap for the closed versions of Android.

[zepto]

To clarify - I should have said: “it’s hard to take AOSP seriously as an open phone platform”

[lern_too_spel]

It already does. https://bubu1.eu/openpush/

The fact that this is possible is something I have commented about on this very forum for years. It is trivial for the Amazons and Huaweis of the world to build an API like this that supports Google's FCM, Amazon's ADM, etc. and provide a library for developers to use that will let them easily deploy push-enabled apps on devices across all ecosystems.

[zepto]

Already does?

“The OpenPush project aims to create ... Development is still ongoing.”

Doesn’t sound like it from the website.

[lern_too_spel]

It is already usable. Nobody would claim that a Linux distro isn't open just because it doesn't have a built-in push API. You can build one on top for other apps to use, and you can do the same on Android. This is notably different from iOS.

[zepto]

Is it already usable?

The repo says it is unfinished, and commits seem to have stopped a year ago. It looks like it has been abandoned.

Has it been used in production somewhere?

[lern_too_spel]

Here's yet another option that does essentially the same thing but doesn't provide a reference implementation for self-hosted push server. https://github.com/onepf/OPFPush/tree/master/samples/pushcha...

I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon has their own internal implementation of the same thing to use in their Android apps.