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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

The Telegram client is available on F-Droid, so you can still use it even if you opt-out of the walled garden.

Unfortunately Telegram-FOSS from F-Droid doens't have GCM support so won't be notified about DC updates via push messages.

I this particular case the centralization around the push service of google actually helps.

> I this particular case the centralization around the push service of google actually helps.

No, it does not, and you even argued why. This centralization makes it harder to make the system more resilient.

We need an alternative to GCM.

I'd argue that in this case the centralization helps because blocking GCM would kill all notifications for all apps. As long as they (Russia) are not willing to do that Telegram can use this as a side-channel to update their IPs for all clients.

The other option would be for google to turn push notifications off selectively for Telegram and only in russia. Not sure if they can/will do that.

If Google will comply with an order to remove apps from the store in certain regions then they can certainly comply with orders to filter push messages destined for specific apps as well.

These are very different actions though, I doubt they would be seen as equivalent to any of the parties involved.

BTW, microG GmsCore does GCM (although I'm not sure if it also implements FCM APIs), while being pure FLOSS.

My problem with GCM is not the implementation on the client, but the fact that Google sees traffic. I don't want Google to see my data nor my metadata.

> We need an alternative to GCM.

It's called SMS.

What are DC updates?

I always get notifications about Telegram messages on my phone at around the same time (within a second or so) as I get the notification on the web client.

> What are DC updates?

Currently Telegram keep working because it's get new backend IPs constantly via Google Play / AppStore services. Since push notifications are centralized they'll stop working as soon as application removed from stores so app wouldn't be able to get lists of unbanned IPs.

Telegram datacenter IPs.

DC updates via push messages? Isn't this what's DNS is for in the first place?

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