I used to mainly use Telegram but their broken notifications on Android turned me off. If a chat app can't get notifications right, it's not worth using.
Personal anecdote: even Google have been wishy-washy between different versions of Android when it comes from battery optimizations (Android 6/Marshmallow is the most hardest on this front), but at least it was documented. Imagine the pain of managing other brands (and it seems that all Android manufacturers engage on it one way or another).
Edit: in 2018, VideoLAN/VLC complained that Huawei agressively kills apps outside of its whitelist (https://twitter.com/videolan/status/1022033608670961665). There is no update on this one unfortunately, but I've heard that it was fixed in subsequent EmUI versions but there is no verification of that from VideoLAN or Huawei.
Ah, I realized now by context that you’re only talking about android. (You only said device manufacturers so I thought you were referring to iOS as well.)
But I had this whole reply typed up for iOS so, may as well include it:
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I can only speak for iOS, but it definitely doesn’t work this way on iOS.
The ability to run in the background is something you can grant to any app, and there’s no special treatment of any one third party app versus another.
It’s not unlimited though even if you do grant the permission... if they use too much memory in the background they may be killed, and there’s a limit to how long they can stay running in the background.
Push notifications are supported anyway, because the apps servers are supposed to deliver push notifications to APNS, which delivers them to your phone on behalf of the app even if the app is closed.
But the transition from “app is running in the background and notifies you” (which can’t last forever) and “app is killed but the server delivers a notification through APNS” (which works when the app is dead) is often implemented poorly by developers and isn’t seamless. It’s hard to get it right.
But no third party apps get treated any different in this regard.
I concur. It is indeed more consistent on their devices, probably because the (relative) unfragmented nature of iOS by nature allows to simplify and focus the app development and get consistent results (unlike Android that you can't just match the UI between devices).
Bizarrely this used to work on Slack, but they removed the feature as part of a fix for some other unspecified notification bug. It’s remained broken since.
What did you find wrong with them? In my experience, Telegram's notifications worked better than any other app on a phone where Google Play Services was replaced with microG. I wish more apps would see how they're doing it without killing battery.
Okay I thought that was just me. The majority of the time, I just don't get a notification. It's intermittent, so it's not that something is turned off. I definitely don't have the issue with other comms apps.
That being said, telegram is probably my preferred app - and sometimes I actually use the broken notifications as a positive (the message isn't that important).
It's a mixed bag. Some people (mostly also those who have zero ways of even starting to debug it) seem to have a lot of trouble with it, also on dummy OSes like Apple's, while for me it simply works on a heavily customized Android where a ton of stuff breaks and indeed a lot of other messengers have trouble with it (ranging from Keybase which shows nothing at all ever to Matrix which pops up a notification every 5 seconds for 0.2 seconds "checking for messages" in order to make it work).
It seems not to be a Telegram-specific problem, and I haven't heard from anyone who actually had the issue and even attempted to find what's wrong.
