And also, it's the 21st century and we don't need chat protocols to be client-side-liveness chatty to "stay on" when the entire cellular network is architected to find devices and route messages to them.
IRC isn't a well-designed protocol for this use case, and a "land-side" bouncer that bridges the chatty protocol to a lazier protocol ought to be more energy-efficient overall.
That's fine. you are "free" to hack your own version of Android that modifies the APIs to disregard power-management best practices.
... and maybe your own hardware to run them on. But I wouldn't expect any major player competing against other companies to do the work for you when the outcome is supporting some chat protocols that most people don't use.
(Otherwise, if you're expecting vendors to do it for you, you get to expect the lecture that comes with that expectation, in the form of APIs designed to minimize the ease of doing the wrong-for-the-average-utility-of-the-platform thing. Your cell radio could probably be adjusted to operate as a spark-gap transmitter also, but I don't expect them to provide an easy API for that either ;) ).
IRC isn't a well-designed protocol for this use case, and a "land-side" bouncer that bridges the chatty protocol to a lazier protocol ought to be more energy-efficient overall.