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Today, all mobile platforms has their own Push Notification platform used to deliver asynchronous messages to devices, trying to keep the minimum of opened connections from the system and apps to third party servers and encapsulate all push information in one single channel.
All these platforms have a common denominator, all of them maintains a TCP socket opened all the time.
This socket kept opened by the system is used to deliver the notifications when it's needed. Some of the systems are really lightweight, meanwhile others carry a lot of payload, have signaling messages, priorities and other advanced features.
Internet Push solutions are based on a public accessible server which handles all the notification acceptance and delivery from third party servers to the phones.
These solutions are not designed considering how mobile networks work and forces the handset to maintain an open socket with the server in order to deliver the notification as quick as possible.
This way of working increases the signaling in cellular networks and handsets battery usage. For more information about this, please refer to "Mobile network issues with current Push platforms" chapter.