Network push notifications

[mozzwald]

It would be nice to have some sort of push notification implementation on the ZeroPhone similar in function to Google Cloud Messaging (aka GCM, now Firebase Cloud Messaging FCM). Applications could receive notifications from a central server (self hosted) to reduce data usage.

One use case is email. Without push notifications, the phone needs to poll the email server every x minutes to check for new messages.

Here's a list of some push notification api's I have found that may or may not be suitable. Most options I found end up tying into FCM or iOS notification systems.

Notica
Pushjet
OwnPush
MQTT

[CRImier]

I think this would be really useful for app developers and battery saving - as we get more and more network-connected apps, they will have to get some kind of way to avoid polling their own servers (each having their own network connectivity bug handling code, too). Of course, we can't push that onto developers, but being able to add support to your own application would be amazing.

Questions:

• Can we provide that in centralized manner on zerophone.org, for the majority of the users?
  • Should we?