Hello from my new GrapheneOS phone! I’m working on getting things set up and have come to the notification issue. I’ve heard this brought up tangentially but haven’t put enough together to be actionable, and my initial searches mostly turn up info for app developers rather than end users.

Is there a way to get reliable and timely push notifications without Google Play Services? What does that look like?

For my threat model I’m not really concerned with people gaining physical access to my phone, it’s more the surveillance capitalism I’ve got a problem with. So I’d like to be able to keep showing notification contents to myself without showing them to Google.

I haven’t picked a cell provider yet, and I’m in the US, in case that affects my options. Wanted to make sure the new setup was viable before cutting the cord on the old one.

From what I understand, this is a per-app situation, so here are my important sources:

• Email: currently use the Proton app. I’m open to switching to a separate client, but the feature to mark read directly from the notification has been a game changer for my notification fatigue, especially with the decryption lag and getting two copies of things as I switch everything off my gmail. I do still want the notification for a lot of things (e.g. credit card payment is due) but I get what I need out of the subject and have no further value to actually opening the whole thing.
• Calendar: also Proton, also open to other clients. Reliability here is important for obvious reasons.
• Messaging: I live where service is bad, so I rely on internet messaging to communicate with family. This can get time sensitive sometimes. I’ll have to talk everyone into a new app since we’re currently on Facebook Messenger (🤢) so I’m not married to a specific app yet. It needs to be able to talk to both Android and iOS. From what I’ve heard, it sounds like Molly is the go-to? That talks to regular Signal, correct?
• Emergency/weather alerts: this is push notifications, right? Currently I’m using Breezy Weather from F-Droid because I like the widget but I’m also not dead set on this one (or can have two apps if necessary).
• Microsoft Authenticator: this is for work. I might just leave it on my old phone though, I expect it will be an ordeal.
• Smart home degoogling is Coming Soon™, if there’s anything I need to keep in mind there. Can home assistant consolidate everything or does it work through vendor apps? (Schlage deadbolts, ecobee thermostat, WiZ lightbulbs, Kasa switches if it matters.)
• I’m guessing call, SMS, and MMS are a dedicated channel with the cell service and are not push notifications, but please correct me if I’m wrong.
• It seems like scheduled notifications e.g. alarms and timers are also not push notifications. I tried a test timer and it worked.

Any guidance from my fellow degooglers would be much appreciated. Thanks!

UPDATE 1: Thanks for all the info everyone! I’ve had work and junk to do the last few days but I’m slowly trying these out.

• Molly is super easy, WebSocket works right out of the box. And I managed to get my family and a couple friends on board without too much fuss.
• Surprised to hear Proton is so Google dependent, that request to support unified push has people complaining that it hasn’t been done for 3 years. You Have Mail seems to do what I hoped for, but if the polling becomes too battery hungry, good news! I’ve been using aliases for everything so switching my backend should be pretty easy.
• Calendar works for ones I add on the phone itself, but if I add one elsewhere (on the computer while I’m talking on the phone for example), I have to be sure to open the calendar at least once before it happens or it won’t register. But apparently that’s also how it works when you do have play services running, and I didn’t notice, so it should be fine.