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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • It certainly can be a bit involved. When I moved from Gmail address to my own personal domain I did it slowly over a few months.

    I set my Gmail address to automatically forward to my new email address. Then I setup a quick filter which added a label on everything that had been forwarded. Once a week or so I would look at all the emails that had been forwarded and update them to my new email (or delete them if unwanted).






  • It’s mostly a power efficiency thing. Before push notifications were the norm, most apps used a polling method. They had the application send a request every X seconds asking “anything new”. There wasn’t coordination between apps, so even every app checked once every 30s, it likely wouldn’t be on the same 30s. This caused the device to wake up a lot and never let it switch into low power mode.

    A push notifications system like FCM or UnifiedPush means only a single application needs to run in the background. It maintains a persistent connection to the push notification service and waits for a message. When it receives one it wakes up the relevant app and passes it the details.





  • The issue lies with Google’s FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging) system, so it’s not something GrapheneOS can really fix. As far as I know FCM doesn’t offer a way to encrypt notification content. Some apps like Signal work around this by instead of sending the message content, they send a little “wake up” notification. This tells Signal on your phone to wake up and it goes and retrieves the new message.

    If you don’t install Google Play Services, you won’t be impacted. But you’ll also not get notifications for most applications. There is an alternative push notification system called UnifiedPush which allows you to choose any server to handle your notifications (and even self host it). But it does require both the service and the app to support it, so it’s not very wide spread yet.



  • Yes it’s possible. From my very basic understanding of it there’s two ways Google can verify devices, using software or dedicated hardware. As long as Google continues to accept the software check you can root and still pass. Google can’t reject the software results without cutting off a large number of older or cheaper phones. There’s no way to get around the hardware check as far as I know.