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Comment by tinkr | Hacker News Reader

I degoogled my phone by installing LingageOS and by not installing any Google app (no play services etc). Everything is great, except one major annoyance: I do not receive any notifications of chat apps, because I am not connected to GCM /Firebase. Does /e/ somehow fix this, e.g. by providing their own cloud messaging services?

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/e/ is right now just a fork of LineageOS 14.1 with a bunch of degooglization and microG. microG isn't currently compatible with the latest version of GCM/Firebase. WhatsApp, for example, works around that but that might not be what you want; it is quite the battery drain that way. Although such push messages are as well (like IMAP IDLE is). Depending on your phone, you got LineageOS 15.1 already. Though you might not find the differences between 15 and 14 major. Though the news here seems to be that there's a new version of /e/ based on LineageOS 15.x

WhatsApp and signal both work fine without gapps, using them daily without any issues and any battery drain

The only app that works well for me is Conversations (XMPP client). It's also quite battery efficient. You have to convince people to use XMPP though, that's the hard part. For all apps that requires Firebase/GCM, the only solution is MicroG, but then you have some data going to google. It doesn't require a google account and, depending on how the app is made, it shouldn't contain personal data, but it's still data going to google...

Signal and WhatsApp notifications work fine on my lineage phone without any gapps so you must have done something wrong

You should try https://lineage.microg.org/

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