this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2026
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[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

If I turn off notifications on my end, does the other person still generate a push notification when they send me a message, even if I never receive it?

[–] bearboiblake@pawb.social 1 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

Edit: Sorry, I think I misunderstood your question. If you don't have Google Play Services enabled but your friend does and messages you, no, a push notification won't be sent, but if you message them, one will be sent to them.

I thought you were asking if you just disabled notifications on your phone if that would prevent push notifications from being sent. I'll leave my original answer in case someone else has that question.


It depends on what exactly you mean, but usually not. If you mean in your phone's notifications management settings, that does not affect the push notifications being sent to Google/Apple servers, that's just a local setting to decide how your phone handles it.

Some apps, though rarely, allow you to disable push notifications from being sent. If it exists, this is inside a settings screen in the app itself or on the app provider's website somewhere. Generally, only privacy-conscious apps provide such settings.

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

So how does it decide to generate a push notification or not?

[–] bearboiblake@pawb.social 1 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

To send you a push notification, an app requires a special token specific to that app and your device, kinda like an API key, which can only be generated for a device using Google Play Services. Without that token, a push notification cannot be sent. These tokens expire, so if you used Google Play Services and just turned it off, push notifications will still get sent into the ether - but never delivered - until the token expires, at which point notifications can't be sent anymore. Badly developed apps might still try to send push notifications with expired tokens, I have no idea what Google servers would do with that, but I'd guess they would just discard it immediately.