All in all I wonder, if the original presumption made in the thread title, "Why do we have iphb in the whole Maemo family" really holds true, as @marmistrz obviously meant to include MeeGo, Mer and SailfishOS in that "family" (although the relationships are weak, e.g. between Diablo and SailfishOS), judging by his last sentence, "edit/clarification: I'm only interested in native apps, not Alien Dalvik." Maybe the whole confusion just arises from fuzzy (i.e. imprecise) wording. @all: Is IPhb used in Mer / SailfishOS (as I have not stumbled over anything IPhb related in SailfishOS, yet)? @marmistrz, do you have any reference (beyond "having heard of")?
What would you propose as an alternative strategy? You want to have good battery life don't you?
To get good battery life you need to sleep as much as possible, and you can only really do that by being a little aggressive and having the system know exactly what's going on. iphp/nemo-keepalive is a way to synchronise the wakeups on all the running apps on a system, so maybe apps want to check something on a ~30 second interval they can register such with the system and then get a kick to say 'ok do your thing and tell me when you're done' and all apps will get the same wakeup window.
You haven't really described what your issue is with the Android approach, other than use superlatives like 'heretical' and 'awful', so I can't really comment as to whether that applies to the iphb/nemo-keepalive approach or not.
mcetool -sdisable