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I don’t need payments to work, I’ve never used Gmail, and most of my apps are FOSS ones off FDroid. But banking apps must work, and so do push notifications. The latter are my biggest issue: afaik, they run through GCM (part of Play Services), and you won’t get any unless an app has implemented an alternative listener (Signal does), which comes with more battery power draw. (How) do push notifications work for you without microG and Play Services?
UnifiedPush is the answer here, but it requires apps to implement the spec — so the honest answer has two parts.
For apps that support it: UnifiedPush is a protocol, not a service. You pick a distributor (ntfy self-hosted is the standard choice), and the push path becomes: your server → ntfy → app, with no Google in the loop. Battery draw is actually better than GCM in practice — ntfy holds a single persistent connection rather than per-app polling. Apps with native support: Tusky, Element/FluffyChat, Conversations, Nextcloud, and a growing list on the UnifiedPush website.
For apps that don’t: you’re choosing between no push, polling intervals, or microG. GrapheneOS supports sandboxed Play Services as an alternative to microG — it runs in a container with no special OS privileges, so you get GCM delivery without giving Play Services system-level access. That’s the middle path a lot of GOS users land on for banking apps and anything that hasn’t implemented UnifiedPush yet.
Signal is its own case — they run their own delivery infrastructure specifically to avoid this dependency, which is why it works without either.
The gap is real and it doesn’t have a clean universal answer yet. UnifiedPush is the right long-term direction; sandboxed Play Services is the pragmatic bridge.
Wow, thanks for the detailed answer! I’ve heard of ntfy, even considered running it in order to get notifications from my server. I guess you’ve given me new incentive to look into it more!
I don’t need payments to work, I’ve never used Gmail, and most of my apps are FOSS ones off FDroid. But banking apps must work, and so do push notifications. The latter are my biggest issue: afaik, they run through GCM (part of Play Services), and you won’t get any unless an app has implemented an alternative listener (Signal does), which comes with more battery power draw. (How) do push notifications work for you without microG and Play Services?
I dislike notifications so have them pretty much turned off.
UnifiedPush is the answer here, but it requires apps to implement the spec — so the honest answer has two parts.
For apps that support it: UnifiedPush is a protocol, not a service. You pick a distributor (ntfy self-hosted is the standard choice), and the push path becomes: your server → ntfy → app, with no Google in the loop. Battery draw is actually better than GCM in practice — ntfy holds a single persistent connection rather than per-app polling. Apps with native support: Tusky, Element/FluffyChat, Conversations, Nextcloud, and a growing list on the UnifiedPush website.
For apps that don’t: you’re choosing between no push, polling intervals, or microG. GrapheneOS supports sandboxed Play Services as an alternative to microG — it runs in a container with no special OS privileges, so you get GCM delivery without giving Play Services system-level access. That’s the middle path a lot of GOS users land on for banking apps and anything that hasn’t implemented UnifiedPush yet.
Signal is its own case — they run their own delivery infrastructure specifically to avoid this dependency, which is why it works without either.
The gap is real and it doesn’t have a clean universal answer yet. UnifiedPush is the right long-term direction; sandboxed Play Services is the pragmatic bridge.
Wow, thanks for the detailed answer! I’ve heard of ntfy, even considered running it in order to get notifications from my server. I guess you’ve given me new incentive to look into it more!