Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lxgr 362 days ago
Definitely, but they don't have to contain any (plaintext) message content for encrypted messengers.

On Android, push notifications were always processed by the receiving app, so it can just decrypt a payload directly (or download new messages from the server and decrypt these); on iOS, this isn't as reliable (e.g. swiping the app out of the app switcher used to break it in several iOS versions), but "VoIP notifications" and the newer "message decryption extension" [1] are.

The same principle applies to Web Push – I believe end-to-end encryption is even mandatory there.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...