Websockets vs firebase

flighty_sloth

I only have one app on my phone that uses it's own notification system and that's Signal. My question is why does Signal use so Much battery by itself compared to google play services? Does google just use a superior system for notifications? Because it seems like GPS uses almost no battery while signal uses a ton to do the same thing.

bookreader

flighty_sloth An open TCP connection does not drain power, all it is, is a state established in a number of routers for delivery of data between two endpoints. Your phone can open a connection and then go to sleep -- incoming data will cause the phone to wake up for the data to be delivered to the appropriate process, which can then process the data appropriately. The only thing that causes such a connection to drain power, is a very poor implementation that continually wakes up (or just remains awake) because the software developer was too stupid to just let it sleep.

I keep 3 persistent connections open (two applications) -- two IMAP IDLE for email push notifications, and one HTTP/SSE for Nextcloud notifications (https://gitlab.com/Nextcloud-Push/) -- both applications register <1% battery consumption, which is WAY less than gservices would draw if I had that installed (I don't).

Dumdum

A websocket does continuous checks on your device so of course more battery will be used than Firebase which does the checks on Google's servers. Firebase notifications only ping the notifications to your device once a check (on their servers) finds one, therefore using minimal battery.

flighty_sloth

Dumdum Is there some reason signal and other couldn't do it that way and save battery?

treequell

Are you specifically wanting to deliver Signal notifications via its own websocket? Signal can also be setup to deliver push notifications with FCM from Google Play Services. If you do that, you'll likely notice an improvement in your battery life.

flighty_sloth

treequell Yeah I switched to web socket because I wanted to remove Google play. I'm mostly wondering why Google's implementation is so much more efficient than signals for notifications. I understand why if there's multiple web sockets running but I only have signal.

treequell

flighty_sloth Please have a read of this pull request for Signal on GitHub: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/pull/13337.

It's been developed by the development team from https://molly.im/ and will be implemented in their app.

Whether that change is pushed upstream into the Signal app is up to their development team.

treenutz68

bookreader

Thanks, that is very helpful to know regarding the battery life. Do you also use signal/molly? Also, may I ask which mail application you use for IMAP push notifications? I started using thunderbird, but I understand it checks every 30 minutes for email, not realtime push.