Thanks for the tips! I don’t think I can keep up with making my own devices though.

which I probably won’t even get around to.

Story of my life fr. I bought an FTP security camera like 9 years ago, still not installed. And it took me so long to just install the contact sensors I bought that I wasn’t even done before I found out they’re completely useless 🫠

They don’t seem to support active state checks, they just report state changes to the app and it uses that. So if the battery dies while the window is closed it will forever report that window being closed regardless of actual state. And it only sends one low battery notification, so you better not miss it or forget, or you won’t even know your state is stale.

Also I’m pretty sure one of them got fried due to having the window open while it was raining, which is pretty suboptimal for a window sensor.

So basically don’t get Stitch by Monoprice.

Thanks for the tips!

Molly is easy peasy, works right out of the box, and I got everybody to switch surprisingly easily.

You Have Mail is working for email, but it’s active polling so I’ll have to see how battery goes with that. If it’s Real Bad, I’m already using aliases so switching providers on the backend shouldn’t be too awful.

Calendar seems to be local, I have to open it on the phone after adding events from elsewhere but that seems to be the case with or without play services.

I don’t see settings in Breezy Weather for notification method. Might just download a few different ones and wait for a weather event to occur and see which tells me about it.

I read somewhere that it’s kind of Google propaganda that you have to choose between them and a dead battery, and a lot of app developers bought into it. Active polling will obviously use up some battery, especially with bad service. But if I read right, a WebSocket is just registering an endpoint for the external sender to call with the notifications and then passively listening on that endpoint. It’s not in constant active communication with the sender. So maybe if you have dozens or hundreds of WebSockets open it starts to add up, but I don’t get notifications from that many places anyway, time-sensitive or otherwise.

You Have Mail is working great, thanks for the tip! Hopefully the active polling doesn’t become a battery issue, but I’m usually near a charger so I’m not too worried about wringing every possible minute out of this thing.

Thanks for the breakdown!

I get no notifications for Proton Mail at all in my main profile, even when I open it with existing unread messages. But another commenter suggested You Have Mail, and that seems to work so far. Whether the active polling becomes a battery issue remains to be seen.

Calendar notifications are working as long as I either add the event on the phone or open calendar and let it sync after adding it from elsewhere. That should be a viable workflow, and if not, I’m not married to Proton calendar, it was just easy when I switched to Proton Mail.

Molly is working out of the box with the WebSocket, and this was a good opportunity to get the corpo eyeballs out of the group chats. I even got everybody I talk to to switch pretty easily! Unified Push will be an upcoming learning opportunity. As a dabbling self-hoster, I’m a little hesitant to host anything higher stakes than Jellyfin until/unless I can get a redundant server set up. (In this economy?)

Honestly I have not tried MS authenticator, it looks like it’s only officially available through play store, and an authenticator seems like a dicey thing to get bootleg. Also against company policy, not willing to get fired over this. I’m already planning to keep my old phone as basically a work mp3 player, so the authenticator can also live there without much extra trouble.