1–7 Oct 2022
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Europe/Madrid timezone

Push Notifications - Infrastructure (not just) for Plasma Mobile

2 Oct 2022, 12:40
40m
Room 2

Room 2

Talk (40 min) Nuts and Bolts

Speaker

Volker Krause (KDE)

Description

Push notifications are a relevant platform feature of the proprietary mobile ecosystems, and while sometimes abused they are essential for realtime communication or public alert applications for example. How can we bring this to FOSS platforms as well?

== Description ==
Push notifications avoid that applications waiting for important information from a remote backend have to be continuously running and keep their own network connections alive, which is particularly inefficient on battery powered or otherwise resource constrained devices. This is achieved by a platform service maintaining a single network connection and activating the responsible application when receiving a corresponding message.

This comes at a price though, in form of needing server-side infrastructure. On the proprietary platforms this is done centrally by Google and Apple, and using their services is practically mandatory for using push notifications. In the FOSS world on the other hand users that cannot host server-side infrastructure themselves are left without any viable option.

In this talk we are going to look at efforts to build FOSS push notification infrastructure, such as the UnifiedPush specification, already existing server components and KDE's client components for those.

Further we are going to look at some of the potential challenges of providing the necessary server-side infrastructure for our users.

Description [see comment]
A short bio Volker joined KDE 20 years ago and has since contributed to KDE Frameworks, KDE PIM and Akonadi, ELF Dissector, the digital travel assistance app KDE Itinerary and three major version transitions of KDE's software stack.

Primary author

Volker Krause (KDE)

Presentation materials