That’s pretty much exactly it. Not much benefit for only one application. But I have multiple apps that all recieves notifications via UnifiedPush. My UnifiedPush client (ntfy) stays running in the background, the rest of the apps can go to sleep and get woken up if something haopens.

Is that with using UnifiedPush or the WebSocket notification method?

Signal uses Play Services for its push notifications. It does have a fallback method which maintains a connection to their servers to get message notifications. It requires changing some battery optimisation settings which might have some minor battery impacts.

Personally I’m using Molly which implements UnifiedPush for Push Notifications without Molly/Signal needing to run in the background constantly. Also swaps a few other Google dependencies (like location pins) with open source alternatives.

Having the second profile with Google Services is a good idea though. That was what I used to do before I shed my last few Google dependencies.

We all know all the cool kids are hanging out on GitHub contributing to Buttplug.io

I’ve just started using beets for organizing my collection. It’s relatively easy once you get the hang of it. Ease I suppose differs based on how organised/tagged your collection is currently.

You can install pretty much any user agent switcher extension on Firefox for Android.

I downloaded FossWallet off F-Droid last week for an annual pass I bought. It only supports Apple Passkey files, but if they offer Google Wallet they’ll usually offer that too.

They forked it

CoMaps is a recent fork of Organic Maps. So those two are pretty similar at the moment in terms of functionality. Osmand I would say has a lot more features and customisation options, but Organic/CoMaps is faster and more responsive.

Ah, misunderstood your post. I think regular Signal still supports local backup. Doubt they’ll remove it when they add this.

Switching to Molly won’t necessarily give you free cloud backups. Someone will still need to pay for the storage costs.

I’ve seen posts by the GrapheneOS team about recommendations against using both F-Droid and Aurora. F-Droid had a decent sized list of issues they raised. One of the key ones they raised against both was that it added an extra person to trust. You always need to trust the code of the developer of the app. No way to avoid that. With F-droid you need to trust that their build system/infrastructure is serving you the app as per the developers code. With Aurora you need to trust the Aurora devs are giving you the app unmodified from Google.

There were other criticisms on F-Droid that they sign almost all apps with their own key rather than the developers. They do offer to serve apps with the developer keys, but it’s difficult to setup and not many apps implement it. Google Play also does the same thing though, so I feel this risk isn’t that big. Generally they seem to recommend getting apps directly from developers rather than via a 3rd party. They offer Accrescent in the GrapheneOS app store which is designed for this, just pulls files from Github AFAIK.

All that said. I prefer to get all my apps from F-Droid (NeoStore technically) and Aurora for anything without a F-Droid repo.

Yeah, in self hosting MollySocket and my own Ntfy server. I’m in the process of moving it all to my NAS so I don’t have to leave my computer on all the time.

I really wish Signal would support it natively.

I’m using Molly with UnifiedPush for notifications and it works quite well.

Another recommendation for Proton Mail. As others have said I’d recommend getting your own domain for email so you can always migrate providers without having to change your email address.

The UnifiedPush server is intended to be a single source your phone can keep a persistent connection open to, rather than needing a connection per service/app (this is how Google’s Firebase notifications work too).

As Signal doesn’t support UnifiedPush, MollySocket keeps a permanent connection open to Signal’s servers to listen for new activity and forward them to your UnifiedPush server. This saves your phone keeping a permanent connection open to Signal’s servers and draining your mobile battery more.

I’m self hosting both too. MollySocket’s docs are pretty clear that it never gets an encryption key for your account, so it can’t read your messages. It only gets/forwards alerts that something happened on your account AFAIK. So I’m not sure what data it has that’s worth encrypting.

For Signal/Molly, it’s less that the notification is encrypted as I understand it. It’s more the notification content is just “Hey! Stuff happened” for Signal. The app then reaches out directly to the Signal servers to see what’s new. So the message content is never sent via the push notification service (UnifiedPush or Google’s service).

I’ve got a few old PCI cards around somewhere. I should pull one of them out and give them a try at this.

That would require a lot of data privacy concerns to be addressed. Even if it’s an explicit opt-in. The current method uses sample text which can’t include PII. Using user supplied text would almost guarantee they’d get names and other PII in their data set.

I also imagine it’s harder to train the model when you don’t know exactly what the user was trying to type. I.e. Was the swipe detection wrong, or did the user delete the word because they changed their mind on what to write?