FrameXX

Are you allowing notifications for background apps?

I do. However permanent notifications was usually a workaround on OEM modified versions of Android that had a more agressive process killing policies and on stock Android this usually wasn't needed at all. And many apps which use push notifications don't run a constant background service, but instead run some checks at regular intervals like e-mail apps. I use K-9 mail which checks e-mails every hour and I stopped receiving notifications after the Android 15 update.

I reflashed the ROM yesterday with a newer nightly build and used Basic NikGapps instead of MindTheGapps so I will see if the situation gets better. For now I seem to be receiving notifications from Protonmail, but that may be only because their app is maybe using Google play services for notifications.

I am running 22.2-20250714-NIGHTLY-surya.

I will be honest that I don't know what exact shit are we discussing here I rather wanted to point out that Apple might not be as much privacy first company as they like to present themselves.

I can't. Everything they release is proprietary and locked down, so let's just trust their narrative.

I can only recommend well researched eyeopener from Techaltar: https://youtu.be/JHnBOUNxHsw

It makes sense if your phone is well supported in the custom ROM comunnity and doesn't receive feature or security updates from the manufacturer anymore. I am already 3 Android versions past the last supported Android version by the manufacturer thanks to community maintained ROMs. (Xiaomi Poco X3 NFC).

Google play services is a monolith, that does a plethora of stuff on the phone, including features like quick share, location services, various Firebase APIs for instant notifications stuff, find my device and whatnot, so I think the size is pretty reasonable.

The newer Android versions aren't that much more bloated. Sure. If you compare Android KitKat with Android 14 it is gonna be a bit more demanding probably especially on graphics, but overall there were a lot of improvements to the battery usage and memory management over the years and I have an experience of newer Android versions running better than the older ones. You can have a 6 years old phone that will run the newest Android version just fine because you flashed it with a custom ROM.

When we get to the manufacturer's custom Android skins... Well that's a different story. Most of them are gonna be more or less bloated than stock Android, but this is a problem of manufacturers and the fact that mobile OS market and ecosystem is so much locked down compared to desktop, which makes it harder to remove manufacturer's bloat from your OS, install different ROMs and tinker with it, rather than Android being bloated as an OS.

You could license it under the (A)GPL, charge for downloads in the Play store or for compiled binaries on ur website and ask for donations on F-Droid.

You could even do a freemium version where some features are locked in the binaries you distribute and need a license from ur website or smth (for those who don't want to use Google Play). (iirc SD Maid 2/SE does this)

Someone else could just compile the app themselves, unlock all premium features and distribute it to play store without violating the license?

Chrome or Chromium project?

Do the "right" thing.

If you like VSCode you can try VSCodium which supports almost all features of VSCode but should be fully FOSS without Microsoft proprietary blobs.