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
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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 leastThanks 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)
Please update what you chose then, to help the next person.
I went with ntfy.sh and installed molly and mercurygram.
Good choices. I take this a step further and bridge IRC, Signal, Gvoice, and WhatsApp from a plugged in device or container to Matrix. Then use ntfy for Matrix notifications. This gives me notifications for all of them in Matrix/Element and thus through ntfy.
Example: Instead of Molly I use
mautrix-signalbridge as the device and it feeds messages into Matrix.There’s also a Telegram bridge: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/telegram/
FYI for the other commenters, UnifiedPush can work thru the Prosody
mod_unified_pushor any server with aupwhere Conversations (& its forks like Cheogram, Monocles, Blabber) can be a distributor. This has the added bonus of coming with an awesome decentralized XMPP chat server getting to reuse a single connection & single app to server instead of separate ones. Conversations is the most efficient chat client on Android in terms of resources (battery, network, RAM) so might as well keep it lightweight—which you are probably trying to get push notifications from the likes of Signal or Element, but what is the point when you have an efficient XMPP server for your chat needs?However, I think UnifiedPush might be a bit flawed—as if the startup that created ntfy is pushing others to try to adopt their standard instead of getting folks on board with the older & capable MQTT (which also can be ran thru
mod_mqtton your XMPP server). I am not yet sure if this is a tinfoil take or not.nfty for applications that support it. your only other choice is microg
your only other choice is microg
Doesn’t work on GrapheneOS, since it requires root access for signature spoofing. And it’s not any better than Sandboxed play services.
Are you talking about ntfy? And if so, could you give more context? I run a self-hosted ntfy and am thinking of switching to GOS.
Sorry, forgot to include a blockquote. I was talking about microG. Ntfy is a regular user-installable app, you just need to grant it permission to run in the background, i.e. disable battery optimization.
I believe they’re referring to microg. Never used ntfy so I’m not too sure.
You’re damn right
Only thing I have a problem with right now is proton mail. Hopefully soon they will be implementing notifications that don’t rely on google play (they said they are working on it)
I don’t know about Telegram, but I know, at least with Signal, it should work with web sockets, and allow you to get notifications that way. At least that’s how I get my notifications on Molly, which is a fork of signal. While not many applications support it, you might also look into UnifiedPush and ntfy which is a UP app from F-Droid.
Telegram just sits in the background and works, I don’t understand OP’s problem. The only downside compared to gplay version is that there’s a persistent notification.
Yeah, Molly does the same thing and doesn’t cause me any problems.
I use ntfy from fdroid
It depends. Some apps have their push notifications system but may consume more battery.
You should list what apps
You’re right I need reliable notifications for Telegram and signal
There’s a fork of Telegram on F-droid called “Telegram FOSS” that runs a background service for notifications. I’ve used it and the effect on battery drain is pretty minor, like maybe 2% per charge. Not sure if something similar exists for Signal.
I use MicroG on my phone, it’s a basic FOSS replacement for GMS and makes push notifications work for all apps. It gets push notifs from Google’s servers but you don’t need an account. It doesn’t use Google at all for location, which is nice as that’s a highly invasive aspect of Play Services. Not all ROMs are compatible with it, I use it on Lineage
I use MicroG on my phone, it’s a basic FOSS replacement for GMS and makes push notifications work for all apps. It gets push notifs from Google’s servers but you don’t need an account. It doesn’t use Google at all for location, which is nice as that’s a highly invasive aspect of Play Services. Not all ROMs are compatible with it, I use it on Lineage
Does it work with WhatsApp? Its the only app that drains my battery like crazy. I had it installed but didn’t work
It’s a drop-in replacement so it should provide push notifications and location functionality just fine for every app. Other functionality such as IAPs will probably be unsupported.
From the data I see on Plexus for WhatsApp, the core functionality and notifications work just fine on MicroG, but backing up chats to Google Drive is broken.
Then I’m just unlucky because it didn’t work for me, no push notifications
What ROM are you using? MicroG depends on a ROM feature called “signature spoofing” that allows it to impersonate the Play Services apps.
GrapheneOS
Signal does its own notifications
Very badly
Yea but it drains my battery
Why do you not want play services on grapheneos? Doesn’t the sandboxing remove any issues with it?
The irony of using a Google Pixel and degoogling it for use
It’s truly ironic, but its really a good choice, if you don’t care about repairability and removable battery
Holy shit I just commented it was ironic, didn’t even say it was bad or good and I got 12 down votes? I suppose the reddit hivemind mentality carries over to Lemmy as well
that, or bots. Apparently it’s possible to view the list of downvoters, somehow (like through mbin I think), so you may be able to check what sort of content do they post, if any
I don’t know, if your goal is security Pixels have the best hardware and GrapheneOS the best software. It makes a lot of sense.
Sure, but it’s still ironic. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing to buy a Google device just to degoogle it, but I think that does fit the definition of irony.
Wtf would you want that for?
