Nope... Like MetropleX said Signal is better if you want notifications and don't want Play Services (big G)...

    In my case, I get push notifications from Molly without Play Services.

      houdini Same here. I installed the FOSS version of Molly on both of my GOS devices and the push notifications works like a charm. One of the devices uses Play Services and the other device doesn’t. Maybe there is an issue on the non-FOSS version on devices that doesn’t use Google Play Services?

        evalda Frost houdini Would appear I was either outdated with the info or operating on incorrect info I'd gleaned from somewhere.

        Confirmed with the dev team: Molly supports websockets on both versions for push and FCM on the non FOSS version if available..

        Arnauld No privacy concerns.

          MetropleX if you don't wish to use Play Services, as far as I am aware only Signal offers an alternative push notification service.

          I can confirm that. Signal provide a direct download of an APK that uses WebSockets and has its own update notifier too.

          Arnauld I can heavily recommend Molly, have it running smoothly for over a year now! The dev is highly respected. The FOSS version does not use Play Services and it works like a charm! Molly is identical to Signal except for added security feature that are well documented here. A bit further down on that page the differences between Molly and Molly-FOSS are summarised. Molly is available via F-Droid and via direct APK download from the GitHub page. There is also a friendly Molly space on Matrix, check it out and feel free to ask any question you might have (https://matrix.to/#/#mollyim-space:matrix.org)! :)

          evalda Another thing to consider moxie doesn't like forks

          I think especially when forks use "Signal" in their name. Also, he is not part of Signal anymore and their servers cannot differentiate different clients anyway. :)

            evalda

            yeah, the man is still on the board

            Oh thanks for the correction, I wasn't aware! :)

            Servers can if they go out of there way.

            Huh, I didn't know that either. I was told that that's not possible. Do you mind elaborating a bit? No worries if you don't have time for that. :)

            No worries, it's just my speculation... Not a fact... Molly for instance diverged from Signal enough to have a different fingerprint in their api calls to the server.

            Another possibility they may decide to refuse clients unless signed by signal... Please note this is NOT the case today and they never even hinted that they will ever do something like that... Still technically possible.

            Again none of that should be a reason not to use a fork. Other reasons like trusting another part are way more important... I bought it up just so people have full picture

            a year later
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            • Edited

            Arnauld Well they can have privacy concerns, since they are embedding Google-provided client libraries
            in their apps anyway [1] (in order to work with Google play services)

            [1] I am kinda sure that Molly FOSS doesn't include Google-provided client libraries