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Comment by ptidhomme | Hacker News Reader

Same for us on our Grapheneos Pixels. Notification are a bit of a lottery. But we take that as a feature. People can call if there's an emergency.

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Push notifications work reliably on GrapheneOS via both Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging (via sandboxed Google Play) and UnifiedPush. Your later replies indicate you aren't using either of those but rather app-specific fallbacks. WhatsApp doesn't implement a reliable fallback. Signal's fallback should work fine but is very inefficient compared to using either FCM or the Molly fork with UnifiedPush. Both FCM and UnifiedPush do work reliably.

On all apps? I have never had issues with notifications...

Some don't work at all, bc they must be GSF-only I guess (installed via Aurora store). Others like Whatsapp or Signal sort of work but sometimes the app seems to not be running (even though I set up the no battery optimization). And I get multiple unread messages at once when manually starting the app.

If you aren't using sandboxed Google Play then you're not going to have push notifications in apps solely implementing those via FCM. That's your decision and not an issue with push notifications on GrapheneOS. You're using the fallback push notification systems in WhatsApp and Signal rather than FCM. Neither app cares much about those fallbacks. If you want reliable push notifications without FCM for Signal then you need the Molly fork of Signal with a UnifiedPush provider. There are hosted UnifiedPush and MollySocket services so you don't need to host it up yourself.

Thanks for the tips. To be clear I absolutely wasn't criticizing GrapheneOS in any way. I know things are this way (and my choice) and I'm perfectly fine with it.

In any case, many thanks for your work. GrapheneOS is a breath of fresh air in the consumer electronics nightmare.

That's a very important bit of news to me. As someone that's considering GrapheneOS is there guidance on these decisions either in device or a new users key concepts article I need to read?

There are a few ways to address that. I run Molly in the Owner profile without Play Services and it's been solid.

You may want to peruse the various sections of their site before switching to see if you think it'll work for you: https://grapheneos.org/features

I recommend reading https://grapheneos.org/usage and https://grapheneos.org/faq, at least in parts. You can take a look at the table of contents and see what's relevant for you.

Same, they work fine and are immediate. The only exception has been Signal. Must be that I'm using sandboxed Google Play Services?

I use sandboxed Google Play Services, Signal has been fine... I cannot say it's always immediate (I'm not always on my phone :-) ), but I have never been frustrated for "missing" a notification. Like when I check my phone, the Signal messages are there, they don't appear 3 days later.

Oh, they certainly don't appear days later. But sometimes they do between ~1-30 minutes. This is a well-known issue, you can find many topic about it. When you open the app, everything comes in all at onec.

It is sometimes annoying to me. I cycle a lot and sometimes my wife or somebody else sends a message when I'm on the go (like picking up some extra groceries) and then I miss it.

There is a longer discussion with various people here:

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/14166

I see, I don't know. 1-30min could totally go under my radar :-). When it's urgent I ask people to call me.

So yeah, I can totally accept that this may be a thing.

I wonder if they installed something like "adblockers" in their devices on networks that constantly kills keep-alive connection to Google servers which actually delivers the message.

Or somehow broke the device-side wakeup for that keepalive.

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