Yesterday I decided to create a second profile on my Pixel 5 with GrapheneOS. The idea was that I would only keep Google Play Services (GPS) and Google Play Store (GPS2) there together with WhatsApp (need it go my kids school) and bank apps, and therefore shut down second profile for most of the time. So, I deleted GPS and GPS2 on the main profile and since then, I have Signal Messaging complaining that it requires GPS. I know I ough to probably be complaining with Signal developers, but before I go down that route I just wanted to reassure myself that this is normal behaviour. Presumably, Signal is complaining that it requires GPS only because its the only way it can notify a user that an update is available? I’ve done some minimal tests and it seems to be working normally, despite GPS is not installed on the main profile. I guess I could move to SimpleX and ditch Signal but that would be tough given I spent years convincing people to move to Signal 🙂
Signal uses Play Services for its push notifications. It does have a fallback method which maintains a connection to their servers to get message notifications. It requires changing some battery optimisation settings which might have some minor battery impacts.
Personally I’m using Molly which implements UnifiedPush for Push Notifications without Molly/Signal needing to run in the background constantly. Also swaps a few other Google dependencies (like location pins) with open source alternatives.
Having the second profile with Google Services is a good idea though. That was what I used to do before I shed my last few Google dependencies.
But then UnifiedPush instead needs to constantly run in the background though? So where is the benefit over Signal’s fallback method for push notifications? Is it that UnifiedPush could be used for many other apps at the same time?
That’s pretty much exactly it. Not much benefit for only one application. But I have multiple apps that all recieves notifications via UnifiedPush. My UnifiedPush client (ntfy) stays running in the background, the rest of the apps can go to sleep and get woken up if something haopens.
There are a couple of dependencies that I will find hard to get rid of like bank authentication. Its getting really hard to find banks that will allow 2FA via methods that don’t require the app.
Me too, but even with no limit to battery usage it still gets killed after a while in the background…
Me too. I am rolling like a fucking tire. I fucking love everything.
Is that with using UnifiedPush or the WebSocket notification method?
Seems to be websocket as it doesn’t require extra configuration.