Background execution restrictions mean you would not be able to be online except when the app was in the foreground for the most part on iOS; on Android, you have inconsistent access to cpu and network in the background.
You really need push notifications, but AFAIK, push tokens are tied to the app developer; you can't give an random server a token from your app, because they won't be able to push to you.
Yeah that would be expensive for the pidgin maintainers, if the other message services had a way to do that via oauth or some such that would be different but entirely not in their interests.
You really need push notifications, but AFAIK, push tokens are tied to the app developer; you can't give an random server a token from your app, because they won't be able to push to you.