iOS vs Android: Notification

Apple and Google design two type of notification system. In iOS, all application share a system notification center. And in Android, each application maintain it’s own notification system.

Either of these two has own positive and negative.

For iOS, application don’t need to worry how to pop-up a notification. System takes charge this. Even the application closed, or off-line, users still get the app’s notification reliably.

As application don’t need to keep running on background as daemon to wait notification, they can be just shut down while idle. This greatly save the electricity and simplify application development.

Negative? Yes, this centralized notification system put all trust on Apple’s notification service. The notification you received actually come from Apple’s server, rather than application vendor’s server. If there is any overload on Apple’s server, all applications dumb.

Another negative is as all notification come from one place, they look in same style. You can’t verify a pop-up is come from QQ, or Skype, until you read the notification content. All those notifications have same look, same sound and even be same annoying.

Then, how about Android?

Yes, the application in Android can make up themselves. They design their own pop-up style. And you can verify it’s a QQ message which can be safely ignored from unique notification sound.

And you don’t need to worry about Google’s server will be outage. Each application enjoy their own channel to send and receive message/notification.

Of course, pair the positive, there are also negatives. First, multi-app channels mean shorter battery lift. Many applications running in background obviously consume much more electricity than single app.

And second, you’d better keep an eye on your background running application. If they are quit unexpectedly, you will not get notification. Actually, you probably even don’t notice it. And if your application is an IM, it will keeps loging-in and loging-out, because your android network is switching between Wi-Fi and 3G mobile network.

On my personal opinion, I like iOS a bit more.