I might be missing something, but I still don't understand where is the issue. What are "background notifications"? Regular AeroGear user will probably want to refresh the list so it would be better to show them the way we would do it.

When I used AeroGear in a demo application I did refresh the list of what I had displayed. I didn't have a cordova app, but that should not be a problem, or is it?

Android: https://github.com/TadeasKriz/devconf2014-android
iOS: https://github.com/TadeasKriz/devconf2014-ios
Backend: https://github.com/TadeasKriz/devconf2014-web