Google have suspended Element in the Play Store without notifying us; we’re reaching out to find out what’s going on. Apologies for the inconvenience; in the interim there’s https://f-droid.org/en/packages/im.vector.app/ but it’s a few versions behind. We’ll post updates here.
You get notifications, but there is some sort of difference yes. Maybe it uses a more powerhungry way of fetching/pushing notifications?
yeah it might have to resort to polling