On iOS, this is a non-starter. The system suspends your app after a certain amount of time in the background, and closes any web socket connections whether you like it or not.

You might be able to make it work on Android (I have a lot less experience working with Android than iOS), but the trade-off is that if every one of your apps is holding open a network connection for its own push notifications, that would impact your battery life. Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) from Google, and Apple Push Notification Service (APNS) both work by funneling all notifications through a single network connection to the user’s device.

And for what it’s worth, FCM just proxies messages to APNS when the client is an iOS device. Not even Google can create a true alternative for push notifications on iOS.

A piece of tape is probably fine. In their support doc they say it’s safe to use a cover less than 0.1mm thick. I feel like they’re more worried about something like this:

I guess I’m not active enough on this site to see people posting about censorship on Lemmy. But on other networks (especially on reddit and twitter), the people complaining about censorship are just mad that there are consequences for saying nasty stuff.