The difference: Your phone doesn't get notifications from your notification service directly, but from Mozilla which helps to hide your digital fingerprint of you using a separate notification provider like ntfy. Prism also allows Telegram or Signal to act as a notification distributor.
In addition, I use Proton Mail which doesn't really allow custom notification services. Prism has a custom integration to work around that so your proton mail notifications don't have to touch google services.
I've been using Gotify [1] for a very long time and have been quite happy with it. Basically no impact on battery life. For devs - there are mature libraries like shoutrr [2] and apprise [3] that let you support multiple notification systems with no extra work.
Right, but if you use ntfy.sh you can get proper mobile push notifications (instead of keeping the app running and using long polling or websockets).
If you use the public version of ntfy.sh then you don't need to do anything to set this up. If you self-host, you need your own Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) account and (for iOS) your own Apple Developer account so you can use APN.
I use it to send commands and URLs between my devices.
On Linux you can do `ntfy sub` and on android you can have Tasker react when a ntfy notification arrives based on its title and contents. So on just about all my devices I have a background script running that is subscribed to a "DeviceCommands" channel that checks if the Title of new messages contains the device hostname or not. If it does it triggers a script based on the contents of the body.
Such a great, simple and reliable service. Using it for all sorts of things: nostr push notifications, link sharing between devices, grafana alert notifications.
Not Open Source but I’ve been using https://pushover.net/ for this use case since forever. The website still looks the same as on the day I signed up for it probably more than 10 years ago. Never had an issue and using that in all my scripts or cron jobs.
Probably not permissions so
much as proper implementation of push messaging for mobile. Apple created a push message infrastructure and Google followed that allows their messaging infrastructure already running on the phone to multiplex messages for multiple apps without needing additional power for listening.
I use Pushover for email push notifications- it doesn’t have a subscription and using the proper APIs.
What do you mean by "battery consuming application"? At least the PWA of ntfy can use Web Push, which uses your browser's existing push notification service and should not consume any additional battery.
I'm a privacy focused self hoster and ntfy was not good enough for me so I created Prism with an optional Android app: https://git.lonecloud.dev/lone-cloud/prism
The difference: Your phone doesn't get notifications from your notification service directly, but from Mozilla which helps to hide your digital fingerprint of you using a separate notification provider like ntfy. Prism also allows Telegram or Signal to act as a notification distributor. In addition, I use Proton Mail which doesn't really allow custom notification services. Prism has a custom integration to work around that so your proton mail notifications don't have to touch google services.
I've been using Gotify [1] for a very long time and have been quite happy with it. Basically no impact on battery life. For devs - there are mature libraries like shoutrr [2] and apprise [3] that let you support multiple notification systems with no extra work.
1. https://gotify.net/
2. https://shoutrrr.nickfedor.com/v0.17.0/
3. https://github.com/caronc/apprise
Right, but if you use ntfy.sh you can get proper mobile push notifications (instead of keeping the app running and using long polling or websockets).
If you use the public version of ntfy.sh then you don't need to do anything to set this up. If you self-host, you need your own Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) account and (for iOS) your own Apple Developer account so you can use APN.
Personally I use FCM (Firebase push notifications) with a Capacitor plugin for push notifications, it works decently
I didn't know what you meant by Capacitor, but I now understand it's a modern replacement for Apache Cordova: https://capacitorjs.com/
Love this service!
I use it to send commands and URLs between my devices.
On Linux you can do `ntfy sub` and on android you can have Tasker react when a ntfy notification arrives based on its title and contents. So on just about all my devices I have a background script running that is subscribed to a "DeviceCommands" channel that checks if the Title of new messages contains the device hostname or not. If it does it triggers a script based on the contents of the body.
E.g.:
Title: Pixel8
Message: https://kagi.com
Will automatically send the URL to my browser.
Or:
Title: LivingRoomPC
Message: Shutdown
Will shut down the computer.
For people in the iOS / Apple ecosystem, check Hyperduck which is a neat app to do this
Been running ntfy in my homelab for several years. Always works great!
Incredibly useful to give any app the ability to send you a notification with a single line of code or shell.
Only one minor caveat for self-hosted iOS users - content of the messages come from your server, but the trigger still comes from ntfy.sh server.
You can "install" the PWA on iOS by adding it to your home screen, then your ntfy instance can use APNs directly (via Web Push)!
Such a great, simple and reliable service. Using it for all sorts of things: nostr push notifications, link sharing between devices, grafana alert notifications.
Not Open Source but I’ve been using https://pushover.net/ for this use case since forever. The website still looks the same as on the day I signed up for it probably more than 10 years ago. Never had an issue and using that in all my scripts or cron jobs.
What's the advantage over, say, having a Telegram bot push you messages instead of notifications?
Notifications can carry metadata like specific alert sounds or priorities. High priorities will even break through silence modes of your phone.
And you get a nice client with icons for each notification source, can filter by them, etc.
The advantage is that I don’t have to use Telegram and Pushover can just be triggered by curl in any scripts I use.
I had all sorts of nfty notification to ios issues despite lots of trial and error and a bunch of AI tokens. I also moved to pushover.
I wonder whats the difference between permisions do giant apps like whatsapp, instagram have for notification service.
cause they seem like perfectly integrated themselves into this, while ntfy has to pose itself as battery consuming application
I'm planning to using ntfy for notifications like bitwarden vault backups, if apps are updated.
Probably not permissions so much as proper implementation of push messaging for mobile. Apple created a push message infrastructure and Google followed that allows their messaging infrastructure already running on the phone to multiplex messages for multiple apps without needing additional power for listening.
I use Pushover for email push notifications- it doesn’t have a subscription and using the proper APIs.
What do you mean by "battery consuming application"? At least the PWA of ntfy can use Web Push, which uses your browser's existing push notification service and should not consume any additional battery.
I've been using ntfy for ages. Doesn't chew my battery too much. Chrome, mail and mattermost are my top. Ntfy gets less than 30 notifications per day.
There used to be pushed.co which was free and pretty good but it seems to have disappeared completely. Does anyone know what happened to them?
nearly every MVP of mine adds Ntfy. Its too easy to not add.