

Are you certain that Element does not run in the background? It always does for me, both on my Samsung with OneUI and on another Samsung with LineageOS. Perhaps not really helpful, but my observation is that Element’s background “listening for notifications” is quite reliable. Might this be due to some settings in your OS?
Had to experience that first hand. I tried to get my best friends to register on my Matrix server last September and join a room for our group, and they did, but I rarely see any of them online and I only get responses days later, if at all. One even stopped using it entirely, lol. Ah well, but at least I got a Matrix server out of that that I can use to federate with other like-minded people.