How do you manage battery life when multiple apps need to keep its own persistent connections open to its own home server for push notifications? How do you explain this to end users, when even tech-savvy people assume bad-faith when it's pointed out that many APIs are cloud-backed, forgetting the most obvious example of a cloud-backed API that is provided?
Or, how does the mobile OS vendor perform any kind of spam protection at all on push notifications if they have to open their notification gateways to absolutely anyone? (I'm not suggesting they're doing a great job of it now, but think about what happens when they lose the most effective stick - being kicked off the platform - that they have)
> How do you manage battery life when multiple apps need to keep its own persistent connections open to its own home server for push notifications?
Apple already has extensive experience in this area with macOS.
> Or, how does the mobile OS vendor perform any kind of spam protection at all on push notifications if they have to open their notification gateways to absolutely anyone
Do they? They could just as easily require that apps outside the App Store provide their own push notification infrastructure.
You act like these things are impossible to overcome.
And you pretend like Apple isn't already earning money from this. Apple is already charging people for the iPhone. People keep saying they are a hardware company. Are they really?
> Apple already has extensive experience in this area with macOS.
macOS runs on platforms with persistent power and/or significantly larger batteries. The power drain caused by persistent connections is negligible given the size of the battery.
> Do they? They could just as easily require that apps outside the App Store provide their own push notification infrastructure.
This was one of two options - allow apps to manage their own push notifications (which requires apps to maintain persistent connections to external servers) or open up the gateways to anyone (which doesn't). I can't think of a third option, but I'm open to suggestions.
> You act like these things are impossible to overcome.
Nothing is impossible to overcome, but most things require trade-offs. In this case, I see the trade off being battery life vs spam (and that's only if you open up the platform, which is the other trade off - open vs closed platforms)
> People keep saying they are a hardware company. Are they really?
If you've paid attention to any apple earnings reports in the last 2 years, they themselves state they're trying to pivot towards services over hardware, specifically because the hardware market is no longer a major growth market.
Android devices with comparable performance characteristics and battery life feature larger batteries than comparable iPhones.
Arguably, iPhones are too thin and light and should be thicker and heavier and thus could have bigger batteries. This doesn't help anyone who already has a phone (and iPhones remain supported for up to 5 years after release - that's a long tail)
Or, how does the mobile OS vendor perform any kind of spam protection at all on push notifications if they have to open their notification gateways to absolutely anyone? (I'm not suggesting they're doing a great job of it now, but think about what happens when they lose the most effective stick - being kicked off the platform - that they have)