NaPP: Notification and Push Performance in Wearable Devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) and other related systems have dramatically changed how we interact with the world. Our devices provide us with “immediate” information to our connected smart wearable devices, smartphones, and other tools. We rely on receiving notifications regardless of the proximity of the device. Notification response is especially important for medical alerts and urgent calls. Notification delays occur for many reasons ranging from networks, hardware, or the applications themselves. Given the importance of on-time notifications, a better understanding of notification delays is needed. In this work, we study notification delays in Android mobile/wearable devices and examine trends in notification delays across devices. We analyze thirty-two devices based on notification pushes, and we observe that there are delays between the smartphone generating notification pushes and the connected wearable device receiving said notification. The delay is especially observed from notification push performance on older devices. We then identify several vectors of hardware and network aspects that cause delays.