Degoogling has been a bit of a mission for me for a while now, which unfortunately means making sacrifices. Notifications and find-my-phone, for example, tend to be deeply tied to the Google ecosystem. However, the open source community has devised solutions. Better yet, it took less than an hour to set up.

Notifications

I assume that Google created Google Play Services, probably among many other reasons, to improve the battery life of mobile devices. Offloading aggregation of notifications, and only having to maintain a single connection to receive notifications surely drains the battery less than having multiple connections polling or receiving notifications. But this comes with the privacy-related drawback that Google is aware of at least part of the notifications the device is getting. This has been a well-known fact in the privacy community, and I think it makes perfect sense to have notifications decentralized, which led me to UnifiedPush.

UnifiedPush is a project that defines an open standard for decentralized push notifications. It (still) requires a server in the middle, but since it can be self-hosted, you’re the man in the middle. The server receives the notifications and pushes them to a notification client (like a phone).

I easily set up ntfy on my cluster and installed the Android client on my phone. This required some additional steps because the notification service defaults to a public, shared URL. Changing that to my own server created a truly private place for my notifications. Setting up ntfy for notifications gave me a second degoogled service almost for free: Find My Device.

Find My Device

Google offers a find-my-phone feature on their platform. Not very private at all. This is where FMD is recommended online. It comes with a bunch of features, like making the device ring, flashing the torchlight, showing the device’s GPS and/or cell tower location, remote factory reset, and more.

Setup on the cluster was very easy, and registration from the Android app is a breeze. To get the features from the FMD server working properly, UnifiedPush is required. The app detects ntfy automatically and generates a notifications topic to send commands through.