So I always here about on how Google Android and IOS those companies can see all your notifications. This is because to show a notification it calls an API.
Is there any technical reason that it has to send your notification data to Google and Apple or is it just to get more data on you?
At least on Android you have two options: you use Google’s notification API which lets your app sleep until the system wakes it back up on receiving a notification. Or you skip all that, then your app has to run in the background or you won’t get notifications. You can guess what this does to your battery.
Decided to go the let app run in the background on graphene. With 3 apps in the background running all the time. Battery last 12 hours, with heavy use less. I’m unaware of how to get or self host push notifications outside of Google. It’s not death to your battery but it defintely shaves off 20 percent and that’s a rough number.
I’ve been using a pixel for 2 years with 600 plus cycles and my battery health is still 100 percent excellent, I did a hardware health check today.
Great. Now do 40 apps and try not to get them killed by the OOM mechanism. I’m not saying I like the fact that messages go through Google’s servers, but I’m afraid there is no equivalent FOSS solution.
Why do you need to be constantly bombarded by notifications. I have one email client and 2 messaging apps that run in background all the time for notifications. And for all other apps I don’t get and don’t need notifications.
There is a FOSS alternative. ntfy.
I’ve been running it for a couple of years, if not longer. Works extremely well. The downside, of course, is getting the apps to support it.
The ones I care about already do.
That’s fine for you and me, but not for the masses.
The problem isn’t really 40 apps keeping connections open. That shouldn’t cause much battery drain or RAM usage. Really really heavy emphasis on “shouldn’t”.
Too many shitty apps that keep doing shit when running in the background instead of just waiting for data to arrive. So Google takes the sledgehammer approach and just doesn’t let apps do that and instead makes them rely on Google’s one dedicated background app that they know behaves.
Good guy Google. Guess what? The developer of apps can deliberately hide or delay the push notifications if it detects its background optimization is enabled. Really, really emphasize on “can”, not “should”.
Centralized vs decentralized. I’m willing to sacrifice privacy for battery in this case, honestly.
Ntfy exists. I use it for 3-4 apps.
How do you get it to do discord and other random apps?
Can’t do it with random apps, but most FOSS apps, like Molly (fork of Signal), Element (matrix protocol), Tusky (for Mastodon), etc. use this.
I think using it for discord can be possible, but you would have to set up your own notification server. Like for Signal chats, there has to be another server between my notification server and Signal’s server (MollySocket), which listens to the notifications and sends it to my Ntfy. You will have to set something up that is always online waiting for new messages, and when new message arrives, it pings your Ntfy, and Ntfy pings your phone.