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I had Calyxos and switched away from it also.
Really like the Grapheneos.
Google pixels seem to be good hardware. I’m going to buy an extra 7,8,or 9 pixel. Not sure if newer pixels will stay as useable.
I installed GOS on an old Pixel 4a I had lying around. It seemed OK so far, but I didn’t do a lot of testing. Are you running it with sandboxed play services? How well does that work as compared to MicroG under CalyxOS?
Not using any play services or g-mail.
I use busybusy for work, it says I need the play service but it works without it. My credit Union app works fine.
I never got into using my phone to pay, so haven’t tried that.
I don’t need payments to work, I’ve never used Gmail, and most of my apps are FOSS ones off FDroid. But banking apps must work, and so do push notifications. The latter are my biggest issue: afaik, they run through GCM (part of Play Services), and you won’t get any unless an app has implemented an alternative listener (Signal does), which comes with more battery power draw. (How) do push notifications work for you without microG and Play Services?
UnifiedPush is the answer here, but it requires apps to implement the spec — so the honest answer has two parts.
For apps that support it: UnifiedPush is a protocol, not a service. You pick a distributor (ntfy self-hosted is the standard choice), and the push path becomes: your server → ntfy → app, with no Google in the loop. Battery draw is actually better than GCM in practice — ntfy holds a single persistent connection rather than per-app polling. Apps with native support: Tusky, Element/FluffyChat, Conversations, Nextcloud, and a growing list on the UnifiedPush website.
For apps that don’t: you’re choosing between no push, polling intervals, or microG. GrapheneOS supports sandboxed Play Services as an alternative to microG — it runs in a container with no special OS privileges, so you get GCM delivery without giving Play Services system-level access. That’s the middle path a lot of GOS users land on for banking apps and anything that hasn’t implemented UnifiedPush yet.
Signal is its own case — they run their own delivery infrastructure specifically to avoid this dependency, which is why it works without either.
The gap is real and it doesn’t have a clean universal answer yet. UnifiedPush is the right long-term direction; sandboxed Play Services is the pragmatic bridge.
Wow, thanks for the detailed answer! I’ve heard of ntfy, even considered running it in order to get notifications from my server. I guess you’ve given me new incentive to look into it more!
I had Calyxos and switched away from it also.
Really like the Grapheneos. Google pixels seem to be good hardware. I’m going to buy an extra 7,8,or 9 pixel. Not sure if newer pixels will stay as useable.
I installed GOS on an old Pixel 4a I had lying around. It seemed OK so far, but I didn’t do a lot of testing. Are you running it with sandboxed play services? How well does that work as compared to MicroG under CalyxOS?
Not using any play services or g-mail. I use busybusy for work, it says I need the play service but it works without it. My credit Union app works fine. I never got into using my phone to pay, so haven’t tried that.
I don’t need payments to work, I’ve never used Gmail, and most of my apps are FOSS ones off FDroid. But banking apps must work, and so do push notifications. The latter are my biggest issue: afaik, they run through GCM (part of Play Services), and you won’t get any unless an app has implemented an alternative listener (Signal does), which comes with more battery power draw. (How) do push notifications work for you without microG and Play Services?
I dislike notifications so have them pretty much turned off.
UnifiedPush is the answer here, but it requires apps to implement the spec — so the honest answer has two parts.
For apps that support it: UnifiedPush is a protocol, not a service. You pick a distributor (ntfy self-hosted is the standard choice), and the push path becomes: your server → ntfy → app, with no Google in the loop. Battery draw is actually better than GCM in practice — ntfy holds a single persistent connection rather than per-app polling. Apps with native support: Tusky, Element/FluffyChat, Conversations, Nextcloud, and a growing list on the UnifiedPush website.
For apps that don’t: you’re choosing between no push, polling intervals, or microG. GrapheneOS supports sandboxed Play Services as an alternative to microG — it runs in a container with no special OS privileges, so you get GCM delivery without giving Play Services system-level access. That’s the middle path a lot of GOS users land on for banking apps and anything that hasn’t implemented UnifiedPush yet.
Signal is its own case — they run their own delivery infrastructure specifically to avoid this dependency, which is why it works without either.
The gap is real and it doesn’t have a clean universal answer yet. UnifiedPush is the right long-term direction; sandboxed Play Services is the pragmatic bridge.
Wow, thanks for the detailed answer! I’ve heard of ntfy, even considered running it in order to get notifications from my server. I guess you’ve given me new incentive to look into it more!