cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/12692350
Anyone aware of a conversations fork with support for unified push notifications? Or a similar xmpp android app with omemo (just the same as conversations’ support) and unified push notifications support, available through the official f-droid repor or a f-droid repo if not available from the official ones?
BTW, I noticed !xmpp@lemmy.ml community was locked. Any particular reason for that?
Also, Converstions requests to set unrestricted use of battery, to use battery under background without restrictions. So it seems unified push notifications would help, though this github issue sort of indicates unified push notifications wouldn’t help, so it just tells me there’s no intention to include support for it on Conversations, but not that it wouldn’t help save battery.
Conversations can be a unified push distibutor: https://unifiedpush.org/users/distributors/conversations/
…and I’d trust it (battery-wise) with that. I have an old tablet with conversations running without battery restrictions on it, and if I’m not actually picking it up and using it it regularly goes 1-2 weeks on an 80% battery charge before it dies, the whole time giving audible notifications for XMPP messages/calls (which I attend to on other devices).
Yeap, I noticed it being a unified push distributor, actually in its settings on can find the option to enable it.
OK, I won’t worry about battery usage then. But the argument about unified push notifications not being useful, but the GCM/FCM actually found useful is somehow hard to understand. But I understand what you’re saying about battery usage. Thanks a lot !
This is suuuper cool! So you just need a second android device and can run the UnifiedPush on there?
No, the “distributor” is the part which runs on your portable device, receives the push notifications, and wakes up the target apps as necessary.
Yes thats what I meant. Very cool concept.
I thought push notifications were inherently not private, since they all go through Google or Apple as the case may be.
Not with unified push.
It depends on the distributor:
https://unifiedpush.org/users/distributors
And how much info they collect. I understand the ntfy requires is really bare minimum compared to what GCM/FCM asks and collects.
On mobile, it’s sort of a needed if you one doesn’t wand to use GCM/FCM which is really bad privacy wise, and particularly needed on peer to peer applications, because they tend to drain the battery…
Some other benefit is that for those who can, they can self-host ntfy, nextcloud with unified push provider, and so on…
On the list of apps supporting unifid push, I even see element (matrix), but I don’t identify any xmpp one:
Note that Prosody has a UnifiedPush community module that is simple to enable. This can save you from running one extra specialized server & one extra always-on connection provided you were already runnnig an XMPP server.
It feels a bit like a Scooby Doo reveal when you use Prosody + a Conversation fork seeing UnifiedPush is all powered by XMPP since it accomplishes the same task of a push-based messaging.
Thanks, this is interesting, I didn’t know how that stuff works. I did read in the news that in practice, most push notifications went through Apple and Google. But if you can self-host then that helps. So I guess the delivery method is normal internet? I was guessing it was special stuff at the carrier level. Does the phone have to poll the push distributor every so often? So it’s not really push in that case.
The phone doesn’t poll, instead it goes to sleep, and gets awakened by the push notifications. Just like GCM/FCM ones. Part of the key thing, because not any one can self host, is that it requires very little information in comparison, and some providers are open source and even free SW. The one I use is ntfy, there’s the next cloud (next push), and not long ago you can use the conversation push service (up.conversation.im) through the Convesations xmpp client. I was aware of Conversations capable of becoming a unified push distributor, but actually was looking for it to use a unified push distributor instead.
But I was informed already it’s not necessary, and doesn’t make much sense, by being very low power consumer, even though it requires to keep unrestricted battery consumption on the background. So no issues by Conversations not supporting using a unified push notifications distributor.
