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Comment by namibj | Hacker News Reader

Huh? FCM is free: https://firebase.google.com/products/cloud-messaging

I don't see the anti-competitive part there. There are good reasons around consolidating resident daemons and only using a single TCP connection with a special keep-alive configuration.

And from experience, it's perfectly possible to not use FCM, at the cost of a persistent notification that alerts the user about this, so they can get rid of abusive apps.

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> I don't see the anti-competitive part there.

Maybe not exactly anti-competitive (but maybe): It requires you to have hundreds of megabytes of Google blobs with root permissions on your device, which some people don't like.

If course this pales in contrast to Apples actions.

https://github.com/microg/android_packages_apps_GmsCore/wiki... claims to support this without blobs. I haven't tested it myself, but some friends seem to have no problems with their de-googled Androids.

Can you use FCM for non-Play-Store apps? I was under the impression you couldn't from the grand-grand-parent.

I found no evidence for either side, but I can't easily test it right now.

I think you can but you still have to link to Google play services, which is not possible for open source apps in f-droid since they need to be able to run on de-googled android which lacks Google services.

It looks like FCM is supported by the open replacement I linked in a close-by comment, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23571663

Aren't microg supposed to get installed first on the device? Which mean if the user doesn't have it, then your app won't run? Or can you embed the FCM support into the app itself so it doesn't depend on google play service or microg availability?

You're asking the wrong person. I'd have to research just as much as you'd, and judging by upvotes and age, (almost) no one else would care. Sorry :(

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