Many methods to trigger running are frequently abused by applications that don’t want to remodel. For example, a lazy developer could set a timer to trigger running an app every five minutes to check email. This is a really bad design because we have to keep the app in memory all the time and able to run which waste the battery. An app shouldn’t check for anything by polling. Rather, the email provider should tell Android to trigger the app to run on your phone whenever an email arrives, even if the app isn’t running! Push. Don’t pull the data. no useless spinning. It runs only when the email arrives and at no other time.

Thank you for the detailed post. Something still doesn’t compute here because one of the email apps that gets put in the freezer is Google’s own Gmail app. If your explanation is correct, what does it say about the fact that Google can’t convince their own developers to do the right thing. Overall pretty sad state of affairs as far as push notifications on Android go.