An article about Building the Self-Agency Mobile Ecosystem: Push Messaging
Push messaging is the system that enables incoming messages to wake up and reach our apps, instantly and efficiently. But Who Cares Who Delivers Our Notifications? Our answer is: we care, and we do not like being locked in to depending on one mega-corp's system.
Therefore, in our libre mobile computing devices, we require a push-messaging infrastructure built from open standard technology that gives us freedom to choose our service providers and authority over them.
Should we consider standardising a UP client-server protocol so that a built-in distributor can work with several different server implementations and vice-versa?
Not necessarily, and I will attempt to explain why.
UnifiedPush open-standard push messaging complements degoogled android-compatible phone OS's such as LineageOS.
People who do not want to depend on Google or have them control our devices are using android-compatible but not google-controlled phones, a.k.a. “degoogled phones”. We have been asking (ourselves) for several years if we can have google-free push notifications. Thanks to the developers of the UnifiedPush standard, the answer is now, “yes!”
The open standard UnifiedPush.org has now been created. While not a large number yet, a useful handful of apps already support UnifiedPush, including several matrix and fediverse apps. For its servers and the associated client-side “distributor” component, there are multiple successful implementations deployed.
