Signal uses Play Services for its push notifications. It does have a fallback method which maintains a connection to their servers to get message notifications. It requires changing some battery optimisation settings which might have some minor battery impacts.

Personally I'm using Molly which implements UnifiedPush for Push Notifications without Molly/Signal needing to run in the background constantly. Also swaps a few other Google dependencies (like location pins) with open source alternatives.

Having the second profile with Google Services is a good idea though. That was what I used to do before I shed my last few Google dependencies.

We all know all the cool kids are hanging out on GitHub contributing to Buttplug.io

They forked it

It's a requirement in Australia for it to be paid to the government bond agency. Typical method of paying it is a cheque payable only to the bond authority. Once you hand back the keys at the end of the lease you can apply directly to the bond agency for it to be refunded to you and the landlord needs to formally object to claim any of the bond.

Another recommendation for Proton Mail. As others have said I'd recommend getting your own domain for email so you can always migrate providers without having to change your email address.

When I migrated emails last time, I setup my old email to automatically forward to the new email. Then on my new email, I setup an automatic label for any email that was addressed to the old address. Every week or two I'd review what was sent to it and either update the email address used or unsubscribe. Eventually it got to a level where I wasn't getting much at the old email anymore and finally deleted it.

Ah, so it isn't just me. I had noticed this myself recently.

I believe Steve has said that he hates the title/thumbnails too. But Google's algorithms heavily incentives them, so he reluctantly uses them while maintaining the good quality content.

Apple did say that. This app was a copied from an open source GBA emulator loaded up with ads and user tracking. I'm guessing that's the reason they removed it.

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.

That's not entirely true. It's only very recently that browsers have started using a new system called Encrypted Client Hello which hides the domain of the request. Prior to this all requests needed too have the Host field unencrypted so the receiving server knows which certified to respond with. I imagine there's still quite a few servers which don't support the new setup still.

I second this. Especially useful as you could be following an exact or similarly named community and not notice it's on a different instance.