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UnifiedPush: A decentralized, open-source push notification protocol

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Re: UnifiedPush: A decentralized, open-source push notification protocol

#31

Post by seizethegdgap »

ajvs wrote: post #4
MayeulC wrote: post #2

Wow, that was submitted here quicker than we could do it! UnifiedPush has been a thing for a while, see the official website: https://unifiedpush.org/ With this blog post, we† tried to clarify a few names. Feel free to point out things that are still unclear, the documentation is pretty much a WIP. UnifiedPush aims at replacing the push notifications mechanism provided by Google services with something independent, t…

Thanks for your great work creating this protocol. Hope more app developers add support for it, especially for privacy focused apps like Signal which by relying on Google servers are leaking metadata.

The team has been working to get UP support added to Molly, a fork of Signal for Android.

https://molly.im/

https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android/pull/152

Re: UnifiedPush: A decentralized, open-source push notification protocol

#32

Post by sandGorgon »

notwokeno wrote: post #3

>However, if each app actively maintains a server connection, the OS cannot suspend them. This is a limitation with Android and not a fundamental network/OS limitation. As long as your protocol allows for long enough keep alive latency you can periodically wake up for a short period and allow apps to service their connections (which is what I'd imagine this does anyway just with a singular app.) This works on Linux i…

this is NOT a limitation of Android. Android has supported wakelock based notification managers for a long time. And FCM works pretty much the same as was mentioned in the OP. The FCM manager maintains one long polled connection to Google notification servers and every other app subscribes to wakelocks from that manager.

Your app is only woken up by the OS if FCM receives a notification for you. For e.g. Xiaomi will not wake you up even if you get a notification, unless you're on a white list (the much glorified Xiaomi whitelist). When Android is put in power saving mode, the FCM manager optimized this even further.

Re: UnifiedPush: A decentralized, open-source push notification protocol

#33

Post by MayeulC »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #25
MayeulC wrote: post #2

Wow, that was submitted here quicker than we could do it! UnifiedPush has been a thing for a while, see the official website: https://unifiedpush.org/ With this blog post, we† tried to clarify a few names. Feel free to point out things that are still unclear, the documentation is pretty much a WIP. UnifiedPush aims at replacing the push notifications mechanism provided by Google services with something independent, t…

Congrats! It's always surprised me that Amazon or one of the other Android vendors didn't do this themselves to make porting to FireOS or other services-included Android distributions easier, but I hope you get funding from them for doing their job for them.

Everyone wants to be Google, and I bet most managers see lock-in to their platform as a good thing, and ease of porting to competitors a bad thing.

At least, if they feel big enough to gain initial traction...

Huawei is pushing their own thing, alternative to Firebase[1]; Amazon as well[2].

There's a dozen services that provide cloud-based services to send push notifications to various services. I think the incentive to gain subscription revenue was greater than the opportunity to make these partially redundant.

I'm not sure why it took so long for something like UnifiedPush to appear. It took a fair bit of debugging, but ultimately, it was mostly up to one dedicated individual (S1m) with Android experience.

Before UnifiedPush, there was OpenPush[3], but it never materialized.

[1]: https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/en/hms/huawei-pushkit

[2]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sns-mobile-applica...

[3]: https://bubu1.eu/openpush/

Re: UnifiedPush: A decentralized, open-source push notification protocol

#34

Post by EGreg »

MayeulC wrote: post #2

Wow, that was submitted here quicker than we could do it! UnifiedPush has been a thing for a while, see the official website: https://unifiedpush.org/ With this blog post, we† tried to clarify a few names. Feel free to point out things that are still unclear, the documentation is pretty much a WIP. UnifiedPush aims at replacing the push notifications mechanism provided by Google services with something independent, t…

Sorry if I’m not understanding something but…

Doesn’t Apple and Google on the OS level only allow push notifications to come from its own services? Like, they look for the signature to be compatible with https certificate etc. Otherwise the phone could have a ton of push notifications incoming from anywhere on the Internet. The APN service for instance would only route notifications to a phone if it came from a registered website. How do you get around this?

As far as I know, even for VOIP permissions, iOS only wakes your code up if ITS APNS SERVICE sends the notification. How are you able to install a long-lived application in the background on iOS?

Similarly, the phone radio is listening for calls from the nearby cell towers in the network, not from absolutely any tower. I guess a Stingray can impersonate one, but they would probably need to fake the attestation, right?

Re: UnifiedPush: A decentralized, open-source push notification protocol

#35

Post by EGreg »

ajvs wrote: post #4
MayeulC wrote: post #2

Wow, that was submitted here quicker than we could do it! UnifiedPush has been a thing for a while, see the official website: https://unifiedpush.org/ With this blog post, we† tried to clarify a few names. Feel free to point out things that are still unclear, the documentation is pretty much a WIP. UnifiedPush aims at replacing the push notifications mechanism provided by Google services with something independent, t…

Thanks for your great work creating this protocol. Hope more app developers add support for it, especially for privacy focused apps like Signal which by relying on Google servers are leaking metadata.

If you deliver notifications, you are always leaking metadata around timing.

A police unit parked outside a guy’s house and confirmed it was him in the real time chatroom, by cutting his internet and seeing him drop off.

If you want real anonymity on the Internet, never use push notifications. Always “pick up your mail” periodically from random endpoints on the Web.

Re: UnifiedPush: A decentralized, open-source push notification protocol

#36

Post by afandian »

MayeulC wrote: post #21
afandian wrote: post #19

The headline got my attention. I'm looking for a standard for subscribeable notifications / callbacks to update users of data changes in an API. Bonus point for federated. But server to server, not server to client. Double bonus points for connecting to consumer services like Zapier or IFTTT. I'm planning to use WebSub and/or RSS, but on the look out for others. Any pointers?

That use-case sounds a bit similar to Webmentions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webmention See also... The See also section in that article :) You say it would be server to server, but are both publicly reachable?

We're running an API, we want to say to users e.g. "we finished processing your submission" or "this API resource changed". And offer pull (e.g. RSS) and push flavour.

> You say it would be server to server, but are both publicly reachable?

So yes, the user would have to run a public server. But only for practical reasons, otherwise how can you push.

Webmention isn't quite it, we're notifying about our own API Resources.

Websub (FKA PubSubHubub) does. It just doesn't seem to be widely adopted for some reason.

Re: UnifiedPush: A decentralized, open-source push notification protocol

#37

Post by rgovostes »

Off-topic: Sometimes I work on ships that have Wi-Fi for talking to local services, but due to strict metering, Internet access is usually disabled. So most of the time there's no way to get notifications from monitoring systems and your fellow crew, let alone shoreside team members.

It would be nice to have a solution for delivering pushes internally, and also hold open a best-effort connection to a remote server that allows some notifications through.

The last solution I considered was running a Matrix homeserver on the ship with some local channels, and another instance on shore, and using federation to connect them when the uplink is available. Monitoring systems could send their alerts as DMs or to a shared channel.

Then for the notifications, Apple has its Local Push Connectivity API you might be able to use to send notifications within the ship network. I'm not sure if this UnifiedPush would solve the problem on Android. Either way, though, it seems like a lot of engineering effort just for a chatroom.

Re: UnifiedPush: A decentralized, open-source push notification protocol

#38

Post by karmanyaahm »

rgovostes wrote: post #37

Off-topic: Sometimes I work on ships that have Wi-Fi for talking to local services, but due to strict metering, Internet access is usually disabled. So most of the time there's no way to get notifications from monitoring systems and your fellow crew, let alone shoreside team members. It would be nice to have a solution for delivering pushes internally, and also hold open a best-effort connection to a remote server th…

One of the first uses of UnifiedPush was to self-host the whole Matrix messaging stack. In fact, we have already had someone in the UnifiedPush chat set this up on their ship [1]. Matrix + UnifiedPush would be perfect for a disconnected situation on ships (or Mars colonies :)

[1] https://matrix.to/#/!vwmBiTqilorqNCbGab:matrix.org/$hJpXxhVR...

Re: UnifiedPush: A decentralized, open-source push notification protocol

#40

Post by binwiederhier »

rgovostes wrote: post #37

Off-topic: Sometimes I work on ships that have Wi-Fi for talking to local services, but due to strict metering, Internet access is usually disabled. So most of the time there's no way to get notifications from monitoring systems and your fellow crew, let alone shoreside team members. It would be nice to have a solution for delivering pushes internally, and also hold open a best-effort connection to a remote server th…

ntfy [1] would work for you entirely in the LAN, if you self-host the server and the phones are connected to the same Wifi. It'll only work for Android phones though, since iOS forces APNS for push notifications.

ntfy is also a distributor for UnifiedPush, so you're not entirely off topic here. Hehe.

Disclaimer: I am the maintainer of ntfy.

[1] https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy

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