Hi guys basically as the title says. I have a pixel phone running GrapheneOS and I really don’t want to install Play Services. Is there an alternative for me? I need reliable notifications for Telegram and signal. Edit: Thank you all amazing people for helping I learned alot and found best setup for me
Most libre applications implement their own websockets for this. EDIT: some propriety spyware like WhatsApp use those too, can confirm myself, as I unfortunately have to use it on my GrapheneOS owner profile (which ofc doesn’t have the sandboxed GPlay services installed; I could technically use it on my profile for personal proprietary apps, but it would be a major pita) ENDEDIT
(unfortunately Proton uses only Google FCM in most of their apps and doesn’t publish them on F-Droid or Accrescent)
However, those can take a strain on your battery since every websocket maintains it’s own connection.
This is where UnifiedPush in combination with either nfty or Sunup comes in
(EDIT: I use ntfy myself, also Sunup seems to be quite new, so it might come with some quirks; EDITEND there is also a plugin for your own Nextcloud)
Since Unifiedpush maintains only one connection for every app using it, this takes quite a bit less charge to upkeep
(it’s explained quite well on their website, which is hyperlinked)
If you are looking for Unifiedpush support on Signal: Molly is a hardened fork of the client and does support it through Mollysocket
EDIT: If you use Telegram there is Mercurygram. As for Matrix clients, I use Element and Schildichat. All these support UnifiedPush
Spot on response!
Just a note: in my experience Mercurygram with ntfy is terribly unreliable, with notifications coming in days later, so I personally ended up enabling its background service anyways, it doesn’t look like it’s taking up much battery at least
Thanks for your awesome advice.
Happy to help :)
(especially when it comes awesome libre software :p)
I’m using Molly with UnifiedPush for notifications and it works quite well.
So you have set it up over Mollysocket? Do you use your own or a remote instance?
I just haven’t got around to setting it up myself yet… (+ I don’t have my own server yet, so I can’t self host :/)
Yeah, in self hosting MollySocket and my own Ntfy server. I’m in the process of moving it all to my NAS so I don’t have to leave my computer on all the time.
I really wish Signal would support it natively.
it’s rly cool that you’re self hosting this stuff! though I can imagine running your PC 24/7 just for that is quite annoying
also yeah, upstream support for UnifiedPush in the clients for both Signal and Telegram would be great…
But I can imagine that it’s not rly a priority for them.
(I’m not actually skilled enough (yet) to help implement that though either)