QUESTION Mobile device power consumption and VOIP

[bobkoure]

I've been thinking about the difference between, say, the Acrobits softphones and GrooveIP. GrooveIP has done a much better job of getting calls through to me when I'm on wifi (but not pstn - happens a lot as I'm in server rooms). I'd thought it was the difference between xmpp/jabber and voip, but now I think that gtalk sends a push notification (not in the xmpp spec - or I missed it).

Acrobits has something called SIPIS, which AFAICT (not an open standard) sends a push notification to a device when a call comes in. I'm pretty sure the entire call is routed through it (not sure). In any case, the Acrobits softphone can then sit in background (or even be unloaded from memory by the system) until a notification comes in, at which point it comes to the fore, registers, and rings.

Push notification uses battery, but not nearly as much as keeping an app in foreground, so it's a win. The downside is routing everything though Acrobits SIPIS servers. It seems a better answer might be a separate module that sits on a VOIP server and sends a push notification to a device, meaning "please register now". Android/iOS/winphone use different push notifications but IMO that's a detail.

Anybody have more info about SIPIS?