Yesterday the German Kuketz Blog brought an article describing the setup of Molly-UP (Unified Push) using a public German server.
Using Molly-UP (instead of Molly or Molly-FOSS) has (apart from that Unified Push thing) the big advantage that notifications about incoming messages are shown even while the Molly database is locked. This feature of locking the database is a privacy enhancement, you must not use it but you can. This locking can also be executed automatically after a while. At least the database will be locked after every reboot or Molly restart, and that is what happens: the OS gets an update about every month and Molly, too, so you have about 24 reboots or Molly restarts per year, plus reboots you cause on your own for other reasons. And every single time a “normal” Molly is then dead, you don’t get messages, your are not notified and you don’t even recognize this. Molly-UP can then be a solution.
Since Langis worked fine but ate considerable battery for me, I tried Molly with the Unified Push configuration now.
According to the battery stats for me this just shifted the battery drain over to ntfy and Android OS (or Android System? Should have taken a note or a screenshot). If anything, the drain got even worse.
Then I switched Molly to simply WebSocket instead of Unified Push and uninstalled ntfy … and the battery drain is finally gone for me .
Apparently Molly does something different (and much better) here compared to Langis.
Unified Push should of course have an advantage if several Apps use it instead of doing their own thing, but I don’t have this scenario for now.
Just as a data point for others experimenting with all this.
I never had a significant drain with the original Signal, Signal-FOSS, Langis, Molly-FOSS and Molly-UP (with ntfy). This drain, also reported by others, is not a general one, it needs some condition I probably don’t have.
Yes, Langis was fine. The problem there was that it seemed to be dead for two or three months without any comment on their web page, but Signal (and Molly) were going forward in that time. Even the Langis repo was not reachable again and again. And they also don’t provide any way of getting into contact except Matrix. Indeed I read the reason for the trouble by accident somewhere on Molly’s pages. – Molly is much better in this public aspect, their Github repo has a lot of traffic in the issues section and they answer questions quickly.
I suspect as much, but I’ll just take it as it is now instead of throwing much more time at this.
An obvious visible difference for me is that Signal and Langis on my phone didn’t produce a constant “waiting for notifications” icon in the status bar … that’s what ntfy introduced on my phone, and now that I unconfigured and uninstalled ntfy, this icon is still there but now it’s from Molly.
Perhaps it’s a different and much more efficient notification mechanism now which usually should be used but somehow wasn’t used by Signal and Langis before on my phone.
But you can remove all these senseless icons from the status bar and the notification texts by disabling some settings in the app notifications. I did this for ntfy and also for Molly-UP. Nobody needs these informations that everything is all right. And they occupy a lot of space for other more important ones.
I normally don’t have any icons from Molly-UP (or ntfy). I get a round icon when I have a new message. It disappears when I read it.
Do you allow background activity and/or disable battery optimization in your setup?
(I might try molly as soon as the version equals my current signal installation for migration - as I am still searching for a setup that does not drain my battery and delivers notifications in time…)
I don’t get this to work consistently. Most of the time it’s behaving well, but sometimes out of the blue Molly will eat the battery again … it drew 43% just now, luckily I saw it in time and could charge again.
I think next thing for me is to let microG try to manage the notifications again.
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