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Is there any effective difference between disabling an app's notifications in the app itself vs. via Android's per-app notifications panel?

I've defaulted to first trying to disable any notifications in the apps themselves, attacking at the root, rather than relying on the Android OS per-app notifications permissions. My thought is that doing it this way stops the app from sending a notification at all -- and thus, less battery used -- vs. Android merely hiding some notifications from view.

The downside to this is the inconvenience in having to go into the app itself and wander around the settings, with notification settings not always the simplest to reach, and in some cases, the app doesn't have granularity of notifications to tweak or limit.

Is there any basis to this, or is there no effective difference to managing/disabling notifications via Android's per-app settings?

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    A good question. My assumption is that in-app disabling usually means that the app sends an "unsubscribe" to the push server so that it does not get any new notifications. Disabling notifications via Android settings I would assume only affects the "visible part", hence that the notification is (not) shown. The device should still get the push notifications, because I don't see a way how Android should be able to send the "unsubscribe" message to to the push server.
    – Robert
    Jan 25, 2020 at 12:17
  • @Robert, the phone prevents connections from the outside in. How would a push be implemented? Would it use a Google Pub/Sub service the Android can connect to? Dec 28, 2021 at 21:07
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    @AlexisWilke The same way it is always done: open a connection and wait for data (the push event). A well documented example of such a technology is IMAP IDLE command. BTW: true push is possible. The now gone Blackberry system had shown that it is possible but has the drawback that it requires special data plans...
    – Robert
    Dec 28, 2021 at 21:37

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I've programmed Android a little bit and normally the answer is No.

An application, though, could have a pull of an external server data point which is not registered with the system. This would not always work if not properly registered with the OS. It would certainly work just fine while running the app. and thus in that situation, the app. specific settings would indeed be different.

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