(couldn’t really find anything satisfying in the documentation)
fresh install: I get notifications from calendar and iode news for example - so they generally work. However i dont get notifications from some other apps, like thunderbird and other ones, that i installed.
What are the most probable steps to solve while keeping data sent to google at a minimum?
I have Micro G installed, but atm
Google-Device-Registration off
cloud-Messaging off
Device attestation off
For notifications for a majority of apps, you need a “unified push notification” provider (this allows non-running apps to appear to get notifications: instead it is just the cloud push service notifying you, when you tap on it then the app is actually launched).
A great majority of apps … even open source ones, will assume you have “Google Firebase Cloud Messaging” which is the “cloud messaging” you see in the microG settings. microG will anonymize your device even when enabling “Google Device Registration” but you are not wrong that if you don’t want to interact with Google servers you can just keep all those bits disabled (and even remove microG from “Preinstalled Apps”). Banking apps and things like these notifications may not come, but then you are totally de-Googled.
Some apps at least acknowledge that you may not have Google everything, and have an option for an alternate unified push server, such as ntfy from F-Droid. Signal can use ntfy, for example, as will some matrix clients, etc., but I am not certain if Thunderbird can or not. Integrations + projects - ntfy
Maybe something in Thunderbird settings is there for alternative notification setup?
Thunderbird works, my mistake. Just had some settings wrong.
My banking apps work without micro g.
For the apps, that didn’t work, I could set them to send me email notifications. So thats a bit of a workaround and I now get a notification from thunderbird, that i have some messages in the other apps. Good enough.