Fuck Cloud Messaging

Ever tried to send a push notification to your phone? How hard can it be? I was surprised when I tried to push a simple push notification without involving a third party. It's not just hard they have made it near impossible to send a simple push notification without subscribing to their service. Moreover it doesn't matter if you want to push notification on your LAN or Internet, you must subscribe to cloud messaging service.

Why do we need cloud messaging service? A large number of devices are behind NAT and are not exposed to Internet directly. In these cases, you need a third party to push the notification to these devices. The device behind NAT listens to a remote server which can push notification as and when required. This makes sense. The cloud service providers never admit to this problem though. As this problem can be easily resolved with an open cloud messaging platform. Instead, they have this warped reasoning where they don't allow any program to run in background, except theirs, "to save the battery". This makes it impossible to implement an open cloud messaging platform.

I wanted to send a push notification over LAN. Implementing my own service was futile because of Android's aggressive battery management. I thought maybe adb can help here but to my surprise even adb can't send a push notification without being root. It's obvious that they want us to be locked down with their ecosystem and are giving us the flawed reasoning of battery optimization.

Hey Google, why not shutdown location and frequent play service updates as they aren't helping my phone battery either. This blatant hypocrisy needs to end.

Edit: HN discussion

References:

adb can't send notification without root

An HN user explaining why open push messaging service is waste of time