Such a great, simple and reliable service. Using it for all sorts of things: nostr push notifications, link sharing between devices, grafana alert notifications.
FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging), and Apple's own APN (Apple Push Notifications) work as a single OS level service, and they are multiplexed so that many different apps can route through them with a single connection, even waking your phone/watch from sleep. There are open/de-Googled alternatives like UnifiedPush, but they're not integrated at the OS layer (they run as a background worker thread), and can't match the battery efficiency or sleep-wake capabilities of those built into the OS/low-level networking layer.
If you use ntfy.sh and don't use instant delivery, ntfy uses Google's FCM for delivery, which is what everyone else does. It doesn't require a foreground service and has no battery impact.
ntfy offers you additional options with instant delivery or the selfhostable server. That requires a server connection and does impact battery a little. On my phone it doesn't show up in the list it's so low, but others have reported more consumption
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.
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.
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.
I used them for some time but their Android app used to drain my battery fast, so I moved on onto a pay-once use forever app (pushover), that works great on my phone, and that supports all of the features that I need for push notifications
The problem with ntfy for me is that I get notifications on my mobile through the ntfy app. On desktop, in the browser (Safari on Mac), I only get notification pop-ups when the website is open.
The worst part is that I don’t even see the notifications on the website that I received on my mobile while the website wasn’t open.
Love ntfy. I've used it for a lot of things, but probably the most esoteric would be sending a notification from Minecraft via ComputerCraft 1.58 when my BuildCraft Quarry finishes: https://pastebin.com/n2PRwW0E
I used it for a while. The iOS client had issue showing images (I can’t remember the details, it’s probably fixed by now) and the PWA wasn’t too reliable. I had to frequently login again to get it back in a working state
I ended up switching to pushover and had no issue since
Silly question maybe: why use this at all when you already have a well known, decentralised, vendor-independent, almost real-time, and persistent notification system at your disposal? I'm talking about email of course.
Email notifications are dependent on whatever push notifications your email app are using. Either it's set to reach out and check for new messages at a set interval or use a service like bluemail where you hand over your credentials and they send you a proper push via APNS or Google. Either way not as reliable in my experience.
24 comments
[ 0.63 ms ] story [ 12.4 ms ] threadcause 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.
ntfy offers you additional options with instant delivery or the selfhostable server. That requires a server connection and does impact battery a little. On my phone it doesn't show up in the list it's so low, but others have reported more consumption
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.
1. https://gotify.net/
2. https://shoutrrr.nickfedor.com/v0.17.0/
3. https://github.com/caronc/apprise
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.
The worst part is that I don’t even see the notifications on the website that I received on my mobile while the website wasn’t open.
And the opportunity to host it by myself is really useful The best of both worlds
Thank you very much for your hard work
https://github.com/tim-projects/ntfy-notify-send-bridge
I ended up switching to pushover and had no issue since