UnifiedPush for push notifications

[jacktheripper19]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

• The NC app from the Play-store uses Google Firebase Cloud Messaging to deliver push notifications. As Nextcloud is used by many privacy aware users, this is not ideal.
• The NC (and NC Talk) app from f-droid lack in push notifications completely.
• Given that NC is mainly relying on FCM for push notifications, as A FOSS app, the majority of people using NextCloud are those who are running away from proprietary Cloud Services likes Google Drive,... and value their privacy so there is high chance that they don't use Google Services in their phones and not many of them are using Micro-G either.

Describe the solution you'd like

If every FOSS app that needs to push notifications implement their own push notification system, battery will drain faster because every app will have to check every x seconds, even if when optimizing the process.
I propose that NC uses the UnifiedPush project https://unifiedpush.org/ which is being actively developed and is working properly. It also allows the use of FCM, so both worlds and there's a push provider for it (Gotify-UP) available at F-Droid .

The design flow would be something like:

• The Google Play version will use FCM if it is available.
• The F-Droid version will use UnifiedPush distributor (Gotify-UP, NoProvider2Push, ...) if it available.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Use Micro-G not sure if it supports FCM implementation but even that, metadata about notification are still sent via Google

Additional context

UnifiedPush currently supports the open source push provider Gotify-UP available on F-Droid and Google FCM. It's being used by IM apps like FluffyChat and others are working on it like Element.

[llucax]

Another option, not sure if it would be more or less work to implement (for both users and nextcloud developers) is to use a persistent notification. Apps like K-9 and Telegram FOSS use this approach. But definitely not providing notifications at all for the app distributed via f-droid is too disruptive, and probably the user should be notified when the app is first run (I recently moved to use the f-droid version and didn't notice after a few days that I lost all my notifications, I think for now I will sadly need to go back to Google Play).

[strugee]

Another option, not sure if it would be more or less work to implement (for both users and nextcloud developers) is to use a persistent notification.

I assume by this you mean, use a persistent notification to remain running in the background and keep a connection open to the server? This is a bad idea IMO. It takes a lot of work and is very tricky to do this in a battery-efficient way. It also doesn't really scale to all apps on the device doing this. You really want a central push provider to keep a connection open because that minimizes how much you have to wake up the radio.

[sunjam]

A Nextcloud app called Push Notifier has quietly appeared for push notifications on Android. See discussion thread and project gitlab repo.

[xundeenergie]

A Nextcloud app called Push Notifier has quietly appeared for push notifications on Android. See discussion thread and project gitlab repo.

That's good idea. In principle. But it is not that good, as it sounds. Googles Push-Service helps to save energy. Only the Notification-push-Receiver has to be active on the phone, and not all the apps too. No wakeups and so on...

If every App brings it's own push-notification-receiver, i can run all apps instead too...
So... unifiedpush is an approach, which is very senseful. Give me the possibility to run my own selfhosted notification-service-host, and have one notification-receiver on my smartphone instead of surveillance google-play-services...

So please integrate nextcloud notifications into unifiedpush.

[strider72]

Should be a cascade:

Is FCM present? Use FCM. If not...
Is Unified Push present? Use UP. If not...
Use persistent notification.

OR

Just make it a user setting:

• FCM
• UP
• persistent notification
• no notifications

[tacruc]

There is:
https://github.com/UP-NextPush/
integrating UnifiedPush nicely into nextcloud. The login with SSO in the android app worked smoothly.

[bugbountyguy]

Just out of curiosity, why hasn't there been a further push on this (no pun intended)? One of the main reasons many people move to Nextcloud is to get away from the cloud providers like Google... So it makes sense to completely de-google Nextcloud by implementing UnifiedPush. I almost feel that for the sake of privacy and those who are trying to have phones that are completely de-googled, this would be a huge plus. At this time, Nextcloud is literally the only reason I have to have MicroG installed on my android phone (have tried the notification service provided in f-droid, but it doesn't really allow for the same level of usefulness as normal notifications do).

[sunjam]

My understanding is nc offers their own unifiedpush server. See https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/uppush

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On Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 8:57 AM bugbountyguy ***@***.***> wrote: Just out of curiosity, why hasn't there been a further push on this? One of the main reasons many people move to Nextcloud is to get away from the cloud providers like Google... So it makes sense to completely de-google Nextcloud by implementing UnifiedPush. I almost feel that for the sake of privacy and those who are trying to have phones that are completely de-googled, this would be a huge plus. At this time, Nextcloud is literally the only reason I have to have MicroG installed on my android phone (have tried the notification service provided in f-droid, but it doesn't really allow for the same level of usefulness as normal notifications do). — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#8684 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AANUKZSFDYEE7SY2LY4M2TTVWADEXANCNFSM5AED5YIQ> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>