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Comment by deepersprout | Hacker News Reader

Signal depends on play services on android. I keep reading here that signal is secure and we should all switch to that, but I just can't get over the fact that it works only if you effectively give root to google on your phone. I can not take Signal seriously when it tells me it is secure, but has that requirement.

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They offer an app version on their website that does not depend on play services¹. I've been using it on a "google free" lineageos for quite a while (years?) and it works very well.

[1] https://signal.org/android/apk/

My device runs Android without Google Play Services. Signal has often presented a feature to use its own HTTP WebSocket notification services after I freshly upgrade my phone by re-installing an upgraded ROM. It's not specific to any release of Signal, it just happens when it doesn't detect Google Play Services. There is a process to correct this and make it use microG which is much easier on battery life. microG still connects to Google's notification services, but there is no Google malware on the device. From what I can tell, Signal only uses Google's services to "wake up" the connection to Signal to check for new messages.

I might give Android another try seeing iPhones have also started growing faster than my palm. But I don’t see any sanely sized phones for which there’s a zero friction google-free Android migration available with at least 3-4 years of support.

The app (Signal) works just fine on my Android even when I kill Google Play Services, firewall-block then, disallow them from "touching" anything. The only annoying thing is that all alerts/notifications pass via GooPlaServices.. and tyiu won't "see" the new messages u less you fire up the Signal (or any other) application.

If I remember correctly, Signal can do push notifications without Google Play Services (using websockets), but it will only do it if Play Services are not present on your device. So by blocking them but leaving them installed, you've put yourself into the very small category where notifications will not work.

Yeah, or Telegram. Telegram is not even end-to-end encrypted by default, you need to open a secret chat, which of course is not supported on PC!

Wire is lame, too, it stopped supporting older Android versions, so I cannot use it on my ~3 years old phone. I will no longer be vouching for them, they have done nothing but make it worse through many different ways.

Signal has worked without play services for a good while now.

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