Get notifications from arbitrary services

[Sturm Flut]

A good example for this is the uReadIt app: Reddit offers users the possibility to send each other "Reddit Mail", which isn't real e-mail, but internal messages. On Android I get notified about such Reddit Mail. At the moment we are in the following situation:

- Reddit won't support our Ubuntu Push Notification infrastructure because we're too small as a platform.

- The uReadIt app cannot bundle a background service which polls the API.

- account-polld has no support for Reddit Mail, and we can't just patch support for every service on the planet into it anyways.

So there's currently no possibility to fix this, and this applies to just about any service out there. Every service is different, every single one uses a different API, not even the basic protocols (e.g. JSON over HTTP over TCP) are standard.

[Thomas Voß (thomas-voss)]

We have invested into infrastructure to solve exactly these kinds of problems in a straightforward, power-efficient way: The push notification service. Rather than working around we should instead start looking for solutions to ease integration with our push infrastructure, probably by providing gateway services that users can authorize to translate between different push infrastructures.

The negative example for arbitrary polling in the background is Facebook Messenger on Android (e.g.: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/2vrcuj/facebook_messenger_causing_massive_battery_drain/). While the issues per-service are certainly fixable, it would require developers to do the right thing (tm), and I don't think we should work based on this assumption.

[Sturm Flut (sturmflut)]

> Rather than working around we should instead start looking for solutions to ease integration with our push infrastructure, probably by providing gateway services that users can authorize to translate between different push infrastructures.

As already noted in other places, push notifications are overkill for lots of situations and in most cases I as an independent developer am not able to force a service provider to 1) use push notifications at all (many don't) and 2) do push notifications in a way that Ubuntu can work with later. To stay with the Reddit example: I can neither get Reddit to change their server infrastructure to use the Ubuntu push notification service, nor can I afford to run my own Reddit push notification gateway server for Ubuntu users, nor do the "push notification service conversion gateways" exist, nor can I do anything in the background on the phone.

What now?

[Tim Süberkrüb (tim-sueberkrueb)]

As Simon mentioned, it is just not possible for many apps to use the push-notifications, which also affects Ubuntu Hangups (see https://github.com/tim-sueberkrueb/ubuntu-hangups/issues/5). Without background processing it will never have the functionality of notifications which results in bad user experience. I think it is obvious that users expect that kind of functionality.
Besides from that I think that it is very, very questionable whether battery life should be more important than functionality.
My suggestion is that there could be an apparmor policy for background processing and a settings section - similar to "allow camera access" so the users can decide. This could also include a warning that too many background processes could drain the battery. It could be as simple as that IMO.
That's just an idea, of course, and it might be not the best solution for this problem.
However, I personally think this problem is starting to hurt the platform and I'd really like to see *any kind* of solution, it just doesn't work the way it is now. I'm sorry to say this but it appears to me as if there's not even the effort trying to find a solution for this as the issues here seem to be more or less ignored.