> the important features I actually want generally worked better 20 years ago than they do today
20 years ago, the only way to get proper push messaging on a phone (other than SMS) was Blackberry with a special phone plan where the provider ran the push notification server.
SMS still works fine. The situation for everything else has much improved.
A central notifications server is kind of an unfortunate necessity - if each app would open its own TCP connection, all the keepalives would significantly increase radio wakeups and thus battery usage vs. a single optimized connection. You can still use IMAP Push like you could 20 years ago, the reason few people do is because of the extra power usage.
20 years ago, the only way to get proper push messaging on a phone (other than SMS) was Blackberry with a special phone plan where the provider ran the push notification server.
SMS still works fine. The situation for everything else has much improved.
A central notifications server is kind of an unfortunate necessity - if each app would open its own TCP connection, all the keepalives would significantly increase radio wakeups and thus battery usage vs. a single optimized connection. You can still use IMAP Push like you could 20 years ago, the reason few people do is because of the extra power usage.