this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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Privacy
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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!