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Comment by binwiederhier | Hacker News Reader

Have been working at ntfy.sh for about a year now, and it's a ton of fun: https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy

It's a a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, entirely without signup or cost. It's also open source if you want to run your own.

You can use it like this (more in the docs: https://ntfy.sh/docs/):

   curl -d "hi from HN" ntfy.sh/mytopic

It's 100% not-for-profit and always-just-for-fun.

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ntfy looks great! I love these "do one small thing right" tools in the OSS ecosystem!

A few months back, I was looking for the opposite. A way to bring notifications from my phone onto my laptop. I tend to usually keep my phone in a different room during the workday, and have to keep jumping in everytime I need something like a SMS 2FA or to just check if I have any new notifications. Whatsapp Web+TOTP take a lot of the pain away, but it would still be great to have a way to seamlessly get notifs from phone (Android if it makes building it easier) to laptop (Ideally cross-platform, but Linux). Any idea of any tools that do that?

Pushbullet?

KDE Connect should do this, and works extremely well on Android with Linux, but is also cross platform.

Omg, you're behind ntfy.sh!

I just helped a friend connect his iPhone availability polling script to ntfy.sh so it could be run remotely and still notify him when the latest iPhone was available at a nearby Apple store. It worked wonderfully, and now my friend has a new iPhone!

Thanks for making and maintaining such an amazing tool!

Thanks for the kind words, especially since your friend is using the iOS app, and that's super buggy and neglected. I wish I had more experience with iOS development (especially the Core Data part) to fix those annoying bugs that make messages not show up in the app after they arrive. One of these days I'll spent more time with iOS again.

Anyway, thank you ;-)

Does it use the Google/apple push notification services under the hood? If not, how do you avoid the OS killing your background process to save power?

If you do use the Google/apple push notifications, who pays the bill for those?

If ntfy.sh is used (not your selfhosted server), then messages are also forwarded to FCM and APNS (unless the X-Firebase header is set to "no"). For selfhosted servers, Firebase/APNS are not used. Since Firebase is pretty slow in delivering messages instantly, the Android app also has an "instant delivery" option which keeps a JSON stream or WebSocket connection open at all times.

With Firebase, the reported battery consumption is 0% obviously. Without Firebase (i.e. with the instant delivery option) it varies depending on phone and usage. On my phone it is usually around 0-1%. Others that use it to deliver their Matrix chat messages have reported higher numbers up to 12% (though that is rare).

If you "allow background services" for the app, Android will kill it less often. Though some manufacturers are quite aggressive even with that option.

As for who pays the bills: The public server is run in EC2 ($25/month, though it could run on a much smaller instance), and the Apple developer license is $100/year. Other than that, there are no costs. Up until a month ago, i was carrying all the costs. I have recently started accepting donations, and now all the costs are carried by my awesome sponsors (see https://github.com/sponsors/binwiederhier)

More details:

https://ntfy.sh/docs/faq/#why-is-firebase-used

https://ntfy.sh/docs/faq/#how-much-battery-does-the-android-...

https://ntfy.sh/docs/subscribe/phone/#instant-delivery

You have made the thing I’ve been wanting to make for ages. Well done, and thank you!

+1!

Cool going to check this out

I use this. Thanks.

ntfy is beautiful, I use it to remind myself of exercise, reading, paying bills and what not :)

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