If you’re trying to fully De-Google on GrapheneOS one of the thorny issues you have to solve is that push notifications don’t work without Google Play Services. For my primary profile my goal was to have Google Play and Play Services completely disabled.
Molly allows you to select an alternative push notifications setup. I used Sunup which I think uses a Mozilla service and then you set it up with a public MollySocket server and make sure Sunup has unrestricted battery access and then push notifications work reliably without Play Services.
I didn’t actually try the Signal client, I definitely wasn’t getting timely push notifications with Molly until I set up Sunup. It’s very possible that disabling battery optimizations would work, but my understanding is that IF that does work, it’s because the app is maintaining it’s own persistent connection to it’s servers whereas if you have a push notification server, you have one persistent connection running to the push server and it will wake up the apps as needed? Probably I don’t have a complete understanding of all this, but basically I think there are some battery life advantages to push notifications over other forms of persistent connections, so if you don’t have an actual push server configured and the apps can’t reach Google’s then they either get delayed notifications (only once you open the app to check?) or they downgrade to a less efficient persistent connection.
The other reason I tried Molly was that it was in the Accresent store which seems to be recommended by the GrapheneOS devs and when I first made the switch I hadn’t gotten Play alternatives like Aurora, Obtanium or F-Droid set up yet.
If you’re trying to fully De-Google on GrapheneOS one of the thorny issues you have to solve is that push notifications don’t work without Google Play Services. For my primary profile my goal was to have Google Play and Play Services completely disabled.
Molly allows you to select an alternative push notifications setup. I used Sunup which I think uses a Mozilla service and then you set it up with a public MollySocket server and make sure Sunup has unrestricted battery access and then push notifications work reliably without Play Services.
I’m running Signal v8.24.4 on GrapheneOS, no play services, and notifications are working fine. Did you make sure to turn off battery optimization?
I didn’t actually try the Signal client, I definitely wasn’t getting timely push notifications with Molly until I set up Sunup. It’s very possible that disabling battery optimizations would work, but my understanding is that IF that does work, it’s because the app is maintaining it’s own persistent connection to it’s servers whereas if you have a push notification server, you have one persistent connection running to the push server and it will wake up the apps as needed? Probably I don’t have a complete understanding of all this, but basically I think there are some battery life advantages to push notifications over other forms of persistent connections, so if you don’t have an actual push server configured and the apps can’t reach Google’s then they either get delayed notifications (only once you open the app to check?) or they downgrade to a less efficient persistent connection.
The other reason I tried Molly was that it was in the Accresent store which seems to be recommended by the GrapheneOS devs and when I first made the switch I hadn’t gotten Play alternatives like Aurora, Obtanium or F-Droid set up yet.
Thanks! That’s an important consideration that I hadn’t run across.