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  • Signal Requiring Sandboxed Play Services?

I recently downloaded Signal on Graphene, but it's telling me that it needs Google Play Services to operate. I was under the impression that this was not the case. Has anyone else had this issue?

To head off any questions: The phone is a Pixel 6. Everything is up to date. I downloaded the Signal APK directly from their website. I do not have Aurora on my phone. This is on the Owner profile. I tried downloading sandboxed Google Play Services to get Signal running and then removed it, but the notification that Signal needs play services to function returned and the app stopped sending/receiving messages again.

I realize that sandboxed Google Play isn't the end of the world, but a while back I had it downloaded and had DuckDuckGo running its "Block App Tracker" function and found that it had actually blocked sandboxed Google Play from attempting to track at one point, which concerned me a bit, so I would prefer not to have it at all, and not on the Owner profile at the very least.

Have you tried downloading signal from F-Droid? A few apps have alternative builds for F-Droid eliminating any dependency on play services etc.

I haven't, but I also can't imagine that everyone else who uses Signal without GPS has either. The question has more to do with whether this is common or anyone else has encountered it, and why Signal and/or GOS would require that functionality.

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    • Post #4
    • Edited

    rsm

    You do not need Play services - without play services you forego firebase/Google push, so using without play services will use more battery, but is completely usable.

      Right some basics:

      • Signal DOES NOT require Google Play Services
      • When you first run Signal without Google Play Services it detects it not being available and falls back to websocket based push notifications.
      • To get the websocket push notifications promptly you need to give Signal unrestricted status for Battery Optimisations.
      • If you install sandboxed play services, install Signal and run it therefore causing it to detect them and fix it's notifcation service to FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging, Googles Push) and then remove Play Services, you will possibly get the notification that play services are required because without them, and Signal having fixed to FCM on first use, it does.
      • To rectify that situation you must uninstall and then reinstall Signal and run it without Play Services so that it can fix to websockets instead again.
      • If you use Signal in another profile with play services installed this too could affect the functionality. If you wish to run two versions of Signal across profiles, it is best to run Signal without play services in Owner and then another fork such as Molly in the one with play services or the reverse combination whichever works for you.

      Neither GrapheneOS nor Signal have hard dependencies on sandboxed Play Services being available.
      As a daily driver of GrapheneOS over the past two and a half years with Signal as my main messenger without play services I can state this categorically as fact.

      https://nitter.it/signalapp/search?f=tweets&q=websocket&since=&until=&near=

        MetropleX If you use Signal in another profile with play services installed this too could affect the functionality. If you wish to run two versions of Signal across profiles, it is best to run Signal without play services in Owner and then another fork such as Molly in the one with play services or the reverse combination whichever works for you.

        Maybe you need two phone numbers to do that?