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Comment by karmanyaahm | Hacker News Reader

My recent F-Droid blog post explained what UnifiedPush is in detail, basically:

> until now, the only option for push notifications was Google’s proprietary service, Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). UnifiedPush is a new alternative that allows you to get push notifications without being tied to a single company.

> Applications that support UnifiedPush can receive notifications via a dedicated UnifiedPush application that maintains a single server connection to receive all notifications. We call this “UnifiedPush application” a distributor;

Conversations is now a distributor, and UnifiedPush-supporting apps like Element or Tusy can receive notifications through it.

https://f-droid.org/en/2022/12/18/unifiedpush.html

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Does this work on iOS also?

Nope: https://unifiedpush.org/users/faq/#will-unifiedpush-ever-wor...

It seems kinda silly to just not provide an abstraction over Apple/Google notifications like Pushover does and then provide opportunistic use of new network.

If you compromise your ideals like a tiny bit you can build your network and be ubiquitous.

It's not about ideals, but technical limitations. UnifiedPush isn't an app like Pushover. It's plumbing/APIs for delivering notifications to apps, and it replaces the plumbing provided by the OS vendors. However, that's simply not possible on iOS (or if it is, as they say in the FAQ entry, please share how!).

If all you want is to get a generic message in front of a user, UnifiedPush isn't what you're looking for - just use Pushover, ntfy.sh apps or whatever for that. They use Apple's push notification APIs.

I don't have or want a Google or Apple account. I use a de-googled android phone running Lineage with MicroG. I'm glad for Unified Push because it means i can now get instant message notifications for supported apps, without which I would need to rely on SMS which can take up to 15 minutes to appear.

I am not willing to compromise my ideals. It there were no unified push, I would just live with delayed notifications of SMS, but this is better.

edit: corrected that I would have no notifications, not delayed notifications without unifid push.

This is commendable.

But I personally would do it only when I can buy an OEM’s phone that supports a degoogled OS out of box. That would be not compromising my ideals in my case.

(I guess there might be one or two around, maybe in the West, but nothing in my geography).

There are a few, like fairphone, maybe shiftphones, and you can probably buy a few with /e/ pre-installed. You can also try any old phone supported by LineageOS.

https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/440585818958...

These are not available in my country and I am not very hopeful it’ll be anytime soon

For cross platform UnifiedPush libraries, such as Flutter, it totally makes sense to support iOS by wrapping APNS. Unfortunately, most people on the UP team don't have Apple devices, or iOS development experience. Maybe someday...

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