It is driven entirely by battery life. Android used to allow 3rd party apps to receive push notifications, and it caused battery life to be terrible compared to Apple. Forcing a single path was done for that reason.
This complain is nonsense. Android _still_ allows background applications, the only limitation they added in that release is that such background applications have to show a notification that they are running (actually a feature if you ask me). You are still allowed to listen on a gazillion sockets perfectly fine.
It's more problematic that some Android "skins" tend to kill background applications at random https://dontkillmyapp.com/, but at least, one cannot squarely blame Google for that one...
The "battery life" argument that that they constantly use is also a very poor excuse. Even when Conversations (the Jabber client) didn't use push notifications at all and would just listen on noisy XMPP sockets, it still had about the lowesst power consumption of all Android messaging programs, lower than Google's own push notifications client app (play services).
Certainly I might imagine that if all 1,000 adware apps your average Android user installs all needed to be wired and listening to a socket in order to receive the latest offers (all in the legitimate interest of the user, of course) you might literally run out of memory. But even then there are many solutions (such as inetd like services) that do not require centralizing everything into Google.
> Android _still_ allows background applications, the only limitation they added in that release is that such background applications have to show a notification that they are running (actually a feature if you ask me). You are still allowed to listen on a gazillion sockets perfectly fine.
...I'm not even clear on what they're complaining about (the page github links to seems to have been changed, it describes the current state rather than what happened in 8), because this was actually a thing as far back as Android 2: you had to have one of those notifications up to prevent Android from killing your service.
Android's behavior WRT to background services over the years changed from "MAY kill" to "WILL kill", so for people who never honored the official docs (unfortunately most of them), this was a problem.
Additionally, Alarms and Broadcast Listeners were seriously crippled which made common workarounds much harder.
