Add another way to receive notifications

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#13,290 44 comments 41 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
android, kotlin
Domain
mobile

Research direction

Start by reviewing the notification request and the linked Tutanota post about replacing GCM/FCM. Compare the proposed SSE or other alternatives with Signal’s current notification dependency; done would mean an agreed, implementable replacement plan that avoids requiring GCM/FCM for message notifications.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

acknowledged

Hi,

It seems weird that Signal still relies on GCM/FCM for notifications.

Even with Signal APK downloaded from the website, and having whitelisted Signal in DNSfilter (personalDNSfilter | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository 3), I can’t receive Signal notifications if I do not open the app, because I blocked GCM/FCM adresses (mtalk.google.com 5, alt1-mtalk.google.com,…) with DNSfilter.

While we trust Signal for keeping the minimum metadata, how can we know what Google keeps if Signal needs to transmit data to their servers for each notification/message ?

Furthermore, curcumventing GCM/FCM has been solved by other android app team, like Tutanota (the blog post also cites Mastodon):

Link to post in blog

Is there a plan to drop GCM/FCM (which as Tutanota highlights “includes Google’s tracking code for analytics purposes”) for SSE (Server Sent Events API) or another alternative ?

Dominant language
Kotlin
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Forks
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