Re:WhatsApp goes down for users globally
by sneak on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @06:48AM
(#33328776)
Matrix/Element iOS builds send all notifications (by Apple's design) through centralized developer-run servers that wake up your client app to talk to your homeserver.
There's no way for you to avoid SPOFs for notifications on Apple devices, because APNS is designed so that the only way you can wake up an app to talk to an API is via notifications sent from the developer of that app.
This means that if the APNS servers go down (unlikely), or that the vector.im notification relay servers go down, nobody using Element on iOS gets any notifications.
It also means that vector.im sees all of the notification events (who got notified when), though I don't believe they see the notification content. The notifications (I speculate) are simply app wakeup events that make the app then contact the homeserver to see what it has new.
Re:WhatsApp goes down for users globally
by Steltek on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @04:56PM
(#33336071)
This is a problem with iOS, not Matrix or any other chat protocol. If you want more freedom and control over your communications, you wouldn't choose iOS anyway.
There's no way for you to avoid SPOFs for notifications on Apple devices, because APNS is designed so that the only way you can wake up an app to talk to an API is via notifications sent from the developer of that app.
This means that if the APNS servers go down (unlikely), or that the vector.im notification relay servers go down, nobody using Element on iOS gets any notifications.
It also means that vector.im sees all of the notification events (who got notified when), though I don't believe they see the notification content. The notifications (I speculate) are simply app wakeup events that make the app then contact the homeserver to see what it has new.