Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

UnifiedPush: A decentralized, open-source push notification protocol

f-droid.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 150 posts

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

#111

Post by alwayslikethis »

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…

Is there any plan to have a method available for patching proprietary apps to work with this? Notifications is the only reason I still have Goolag services on my phone's work profile, and having an alternative to that would be great for privacy.

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

#112

Post by d110af5ccf »

n0tth3dro1ds wrote: post #107
est31 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have special deals with the telcos that TCP connections to their servers can have longer TTLs. Plus of course, even if you do polling, if you have 5 different apps that connect every 10 minutes to their own respective services with different offsets, you have the device waking up every 2 minutes, with a potential latency of up to 10 minutes for each individual service. If it uses a central push service, you can…

> Plus of course, even if you do polling, if you have 5 different apps that connect every 10 minutes to their own respective services with different offsets, you have the device waking up every 2 minutes, This is now impossible with background execution restraints set in Oreo. The OS clusters requests for background execution and does them with the same wake. Apps can only wake the device every 15 minutes at most (an…

> This is now impossible with background execution restraints

Signature spoofing is similarly "impossible" there's no rule saying this stuff can't be changed by distributions that care about it. You already have to install a custom OS to get rid of gapps to begin with so aside from the maintenance burden for changes that will never get upstreamed this is really a nonissue.

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

#113

Post by skybrian »

EGreg wrote: post #73
michaelmior wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, if you were worried about this, I think you could get around that problem by just constantly send fixed sized encrypted messages large enough to hold any potential notifications. When a notification needs to get sent, you add it to the next outgoing encrypted message. Of course, now the delay for notifications is now coupled to the rate of these messages being sent.

The messages can still be traced to the client picking them up. Cut their networking and the client doesn’t receive the messages anymore… this shows up as a bounced message. You can accumulate encrypted messages at random urls instead

If nobody in the chat room can know that you lost connectivity, that means you can't do real time chat and might as well use email instead.

Note that a similar thing happens with any two-way conversation; if an immediate reply is expected and there's no reply, it's not a conversation anymore. (For more possible reasons, though.)

Disappearances can't have good error messages if you want plausible deniability. This will make any UI much less user-friendly.

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

#114

Post by eternityforest »

alwayslikethis wrote: post #110
eternityforest wrote: post #5

Looks like a cool solution to one of the biggest issues in FOSS on Android.

the main issue isn't with the foss apps though. Those usually support polling. The actual problem is with other proprietary spyware apps that you're forced to use but they are locking you in with google's FCM. Until there's an easy way to patch those apps we can't really solve this problem

Yeah, I wouldn't even think about a degoogled phone at this point, none of my downloadable wiretaps would work, and I use a lot of them.

But this at least gives FOSS a chance to compete on battery life without FCM fallback like some do.

Most likely FOSS will never get full parity, Android might be gone and replaced long before then, but the ability to make an app that's F-droid legal is still a big deal.

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

#115

Post by alwayslikethis »

eternityforest wrote: post #114
alwayslikethis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the main issue isn't with the foss apps though. Those usually support polling. The actual problem is with other proprietary spyware apps that you're forced to use but they are locking you in with google's FCM. Until there's an easy way to patch those apps we can't really solve this problem

Yeah, I wouldn't even think about a degoogled phone at this point, none of my downloadable wiretaps would work, and I use a lot of them. But this at least gives FOSS a chance to compete on battery life without FCM fallback like some do. Most likely FOSS will never get full parity, Android might be gone and replaced long before then, but the ability to make an app that's F-droid legal is still a big deal.

hmm, I think most spyware apps still work without google services (on GrapheneOS), but you'll have to go without notification, among a few other things. If you need a tracking devi.. cough.. googled phone for work only, you can consider using a separate phone for it, and a personal degoogled phone.

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

#116

Post by palata »

ehutch79 wrote: post #108
karmanyaahm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the actual likely hood that the average end user is going to install a random service? For now, UnifiedPush is targeted towards De-Googlers, self-hosters and FOSS enthusiasts, not average users.

Except, in the threads here, this is called out repeatedly as a replacement for push notifications on phones, replacing webpush, apple push notifications, and whatever google is calling it. Which implies the use case people are seeing is phone apps. Unless people are building one off apps for themselves, you've got end users in the mix. I don't see how this can be positions as much outside of phone apps, as txt messa…

Some apps just offer both, and even auto-detect. So if your phone is de-googled, the app will use UP, if it has the Google Services it will use that. For some apps it is available in the settings.

So yeah, the app has to support it, but the user can choose then.

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

#117

Post by palata »

binwiederhier wrote: post #40
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

I have been using NTFY for months, love it!

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

#119

Post by palata »

mgaunard wrote: post #87

There are two things I still don't get about software development: - why is web development such a big thing - why is app development a thing at all

You mean "why is software development a thing" there? Not sure what your point is...

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

#120

Post by lern_too_spel »

alwayslikethis wrote: post #111
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…

Is there any plan to have a method available for patching proprietary apps to work with this? Notifications is the only reason I still have Goolag services on my phone's work profile, and having an alternative to that would be great for privacy.

The sender needs to know which push service to send the message to, so no.
Post reply on HN