I remember a project I worked on in the past where the requirement was to have the app display a notification to the user at a certain time, like an alarm clock. Pretty simple, and could be implemented with a line or two of code as a locally-generated notification.

But no, the lead declared that we needed a push notification from a server in order to do this properly. Even after the difference between a local notification and a push notification was explained to him (he didn't know that local notifications existed), he insisted that notifications = push notifications, and we must have a server. AND that server needed to run a complex web service. AND it needed a way for devices to log in with credentials, so it needed a database. AND it needed to be fault tolerant since this was a critical user journey in the app. AND the clients had to check in with the server periodically, since their location might have changed to a different time zone, therefore the push notification time had to change. AND this AND that AND so on. All for what was essentially an alarm clock--something you could implement in the client code running on the device in 5 minutes.