[jacoblambda]

The purpose of this standard is to replace Google's FCM push notifications so that you can receive push notifications on a mobile device for a bunch of services while only needing to maintain a single low-overhead connection.

This exists to improve battery life and decrease data usage for android users who don't use google services or prefer to host their own. And generally it exists to provide a standardised, independent, privacy preserving option for users and app developers.

Neither RSS nor email solve this problem and actually this specific service would be the exact type of service you'd use to notify the user's device that the apps that use RSS or email have new content to fetch.

[toast0]

> The purpose of this standard is to replace Google's FCM push notifications so that you can receive push notifications on a mobile device for a bunch of services while only needing to maintain a single low-overhead connection.

Isn't the purpose of Google's push service that you can receive notifications for a bunch of services with only a single connection?

I don't quite understand how adding a different service helps, although having an alternative when Google's push is unavailable could be useful, and if there's some way to share that alternate service among many apps, that would reduce overhead of having two notification channels where each app with two channels has their own alternate channel?

[jacoblambda]

Yes that is the goal of google's push service.

The benefit of this service is mainly for people who can't or don't want to use google's push service. Namely for users of de-googled devices and for users of android devices that google blocks from using play services (ex: users of Huawei devices).

But also it's worth noting that unified push provides an optional google FCM fallback so that apps can use google's push services (provided they are available on the device) when a unifiedpush distributor isn't available or configured. So in this sense it means supporting a single push notification standard instead of multiple and the underlying system can switch between which provider to use.

And of course for users of completely self hosted services this means you get all the benefits of a proper push aggregator like google's FCM without having to configure firebase with your services. This is particularly appealing if you self host locally and don't already use cloud services.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

>I don't quite understand how adding a different service help

I simply don't like having two monopolies (Google and Apple) handling every single push notification for all mobile users everywhere on Earth – except in China, maybe.

There's so much you privacy risks and they can easily infer many things from the meta data alone.

I thought we were in the post-Snowden phase already.

[colesantiago]

I receive content from E-mail all the time and I am also notified about it and it doesn't drain my battery.

[jacoblambda]

But what is your email client using for notifications?

If it's using intermittent/timed fetch, that runs into the latency problem (taking longer to receive notifications). Push notifications exist to solve that problem.

If it's using IMAP's IDLE, MAPI's push, or JMAP's push, that's just another long-running HTTP or websocket connection.

And this protocol (along with the proprietary push notif aggregation services it is aiming to replace) exists to deduplicate those many long-running connections into a single connection out to some hardwired server that manages the many services/connections for it.