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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

Last time I tried no-Google Android, one of the biggest problems was that Slack wouldn't send me notifications

How well does microG handle push notifications in general, and particularly Slack if you have experience with that case?

PS: for others in that boat I recommend APKMirror for downloading non-OSS apps. It's run by people from AndroidPolice which is a reputable site, and simply mirrors (free only) apps from the Play Store, so it's all above-board and legit. The only problem is, as described above, some apps have Google Services dependencies baked-in.

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> How well does microG handle push notifications in general, and particularly Slack if you have experience with that case?

MicroG push notification module will talk to Google servers (that's one of the parts where you can't get rid of Google). That's because the Google infrastructure actually delivers push notifications and arbitrates between app's backend and the app.

IIRC the module is optional to enable for obvious reasons.

Got it. I wasn't actually sure how it was structured, but that makes sense.

I guess that really seals it, for those of us who care about push notifications.

Why in do google servers need to middleman every push notification on a phone? I mean, google play store phones home every 2 mins anyway, but that is extra creepy

Not sure how you imagine push notifications to work, but literally Google provide a "service" for this so app developers don't have to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebase_Cloud_Messaging

So that there's only one network connection delivering all the messages to apps, instead of 1,548 SSE/WS/XHR/GET(!) connections all ricocheting around and timing out and getting reconnected and sending 200MB of pings every minute.

No Slack notifications is _why_ I use it ;-) but if you want you can use Google's notifications with migroG (obviously giving them substantial tracking opportunities). AFAIK the effort to support non-Google notification servers dose not yet work.

It's generally be better for one's sanity to not get instant notifications anyway. But if you need them, you can also get Slack notifications over email. Or maybe you can set up a bridge and use some Matrix client (one less proprietary app on your phone then).

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