UnifiedPush - Push notifications. Decentralized and Open Source
MCLD 3038 | Sun 09 Aug 11:45 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Presented by
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Daniel Gultsch
@https://gultsch.social/@daniel
https://gultsch.de
Daniel has been a freelance software developer for almost 20 years. His main interests lie in open standards and communication protocols, including instant messaging, email, and the fediverse. He is the project lead for Conversations and Ltt.rs. Occasionally, he also dabbles in security research.
Most of his open source projects are hosted on Codeberg.
He is an active member of the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF), serving as the chair of the council and as a member of the editor team.
You can learn more about him on his website or his Mastodon.
Daniel Gultsch
@https://gultsch.social/@daniel
https://gultsch.de
Daniel has been a freelance software developer for almost 20 years. His main interests lie in open standards and communication protocols, including instant messaging, email, and the fediverse. He is the project lead for Conversations and Ltt.rs. Occasionally, he also dabbles in security research.
Most of his open source projects are hosted on Codeberg.
He is an active member of the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF), serving as the chair of the council and as a member of the editor team.
You can learn more about him on his website or his Mastodon.
Abstract
To understand how we can replace Google push notifications (FCM) with something open source and decentralized, we need to understand how they work and why they are needed in the first place. This talk explains the mechanics of push notifications and why, despite their potentially bad reputation, they are a more elegant solution than having every app maintain its own persistent server connection.
Open-source tools like microG can remove proprietary Google software from your Android phone, the actual notifications are still sent via Google's servers (Firebase Cloud Messaging).
UnifiedPush is a framework that allows push notifications to be delivered in a decentralized manner or through self-hosted servers. UnifiedPush has a plugable architecture that allows push notifications to be delivered through different protocols (Websockets, SSE, XMPP) this talk will focus on why XMPP is particularly well suited to be used as a push protocol.
Numerous open-source Android apps already support UnifiedPush, including Tusky, Ltt.rs, Fedilab, DAVx⁵, Fennec, Element, and many more.
The presentation ends with a short demo on how to use the XMPP client Conversations to deliver push notifications to other apps on Android using UnifiedPush.
To understand how we can replace Google push notifications (FCM) with something open source and decentralized, we need to understand how they work and why they are needed in the first place. This talk explains the mechanics of push notifications and why, despite their potentially bad reputation, they are a more elegant solution than having every app maintain its own persistent server connection.
Open-source tools like microG can remove proprietary Google software from your Android phone, the actual notifications are still sent via Google's servers (Firebase Cloud Messaging).
UnifiedPush is a framework that allows push notifications to be delivered in a decentralized manner or through self-hosted servers. UnifiedPush has a plugable architecture that allows push notifications to be delivered through different protocols (Websockets, SSE, XMPP) this talk will focus on why XMPP is particularly well suited to be used as a push protocol.
Numerous open-source Android apps already support UnifiedPush, including Tusky, Ltt.rs, Fedilab, DAVx⁵, Fennec, Element, and many more.
The presentation ends with a short demo on how to use the XMPP client Conversations to deliver push notifications to other apps on Android using UnifiedPush.