LAS 2023 – UnifiedPush – Push notifications for Linux
By Volker Krause (KDE)
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?
Push notifications avoid that applications waiting for important information 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.
In this talk we are going to look at efforts to build FOSS push notification infrastructure. Based on the UnifiedPush specification there are a number of client- and server-side components available, but there’s still work to be done, for Linux clients in particular.
Based on the lessons learnt from KDE’s work on client-side UnifiedPush integration we will discuss possible approaches for giving users full transparency and control over push notification usage also across different Linux environments.
Finally we are going to look at some of the potential challenges of providing the necessary server-side infrastructure for our users, something that is necessary for enabling applications to rely on push notifications.
by Linux App Summit
linux web server
