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My understanding is that you need to have the Play Store on your device for apps to register and receive push notifications from GCM [1]. Since that's the main functionality of the app at the moment, an APK for sideloading won't be too useful, but perhaps we can add one once we add more functionality?

[1] Would love to be wrong about this if anyone else knows differently.

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Unfortunately that looks to be the case. I had hoped they'd rolled their own push server implementation in the linked source (https://github.com/EFForg/pushserver), but it's just a wrapper around the GCM and APNS services.

It's disappointing, because both Android and iOS have support for periodically retrieving data without using the proprietary push services. It's not like the EFF is going to be delivering messages that have a 'real-time' requirement and therefore require a persistent connection (as opposed to say, Gmail/Hangouts).

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