Post #770419

2026-03-24 17:17 UTC

My hobby this week is deleting Google Off My Phone. So I Installed GrapheneOS on my Pixel Six. No blog posts for years then two in one week! It seems to do most of the things I need from a phone these days, if only because of how I'm already deliberately not using Google for address/calendar/email and instead try and do most stuff with self-hosted web-services. Means if I have a browser I have most of what I want already. Graphene here is going to work for me except for: Organic Maps isn't good enough for driving or for busses.Banking appsLuckily, with Graphene, the Google Play services can be installed and they install in user-space, so you can set your phone to have a Google partition and a Free partition and install Maps and Waze and Bank-apps in the Google unfree part. Using a few new open-source things I wasn't using before on Android. Molly is nice for Signal and solves that tablet-app problem I think. But seems like this can work. Away from Google but still only supporting a google phone 🤔 for now. More models coming I believe. Perhaps I'll buy one soon coz both Google and Graphene stop supporting this Pixel Six this year. More details in the Blog Post. anyway. #grapheneOS #degoogle #android #blog

Replies (1)

@pre@boing.world 2026-03-28 21:00

Battery drain on GrapheneOS here the last couple of days has definitely been worse than stock Google Android. Battery-monitor says Molly is the main culprit. Apparently Molly, the Signal client, keeps an open connection to the Signal server. You can't just have the app check every 10 minutes if it has to ring like a phone upon call request. You need actually persistent connection. On Google's android, google's play-servers do some kind of kung-fu to keep that modem mostly asleep despite this persistence. Without Play Services, that don't happen. But, there is a thing in F-Droid called "Sun up". That does a similar thing I guess? Called "unified push". It uses Mozilla's servers instead of Google's. And does so anonymously apparently, but who knows for sure really? Not me. End to end encryption means worst you'd be leaking is timing data really. So install Sun Up from F-Droid and change Molly's settings / notifications / delivery-method to "Unified Push" We will need a MollyServer too apparently as a bridge from Signal to Unified-Push at Mozilla. All the cool kids are using molly.adminforge.de - there's the QR code you need at the site there. Maybe molly.notify.dykes.ca or some other one is better? I dunno. Can always use a different one if yours goes away. We will find out over the next few days if that actually makes any difference to battery consumption. Might save more if you have lots of other things also using open connections that can use unifed-push too. Emails and Matrix or whatever. Mux all those connections into one. I don't do those things on my phone though, so it's just Molly, so we'll see. #grapheneOS #molly #signal

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