How do notifications work in the official Telegram Android app (Play Store vs Site version maybe)? Does it have the same mechanism as Signal, which only recognizes the presence of notifications via Google services, but sends them via its web socket service?
Telegram uses Google services like Signal for notifications - https://telegra.ph/Notifications-FIX its the first point under the Android section
https://core.telegram.org/api/push-updates these are the docs for building your own Telegram app, specifically the push notifications section and again it mentions using APNS for iOS or FCM for Android but they also offer Simple push which would work with Unifiedpush and would be one way to bypass FCM but I don't know if they offer that in their official app or if there are any other Telegram apps that have implemented it
"Signal only uses FCM to wake up the Android app if there are new messages waiting on the Signal server and the app isn't connected to it. Signal does not include any information in these notifications, encrypted or otherwise, so Google can only infer that your device has something queued on Signal's servers." I was wondering if a similar system has been implemented in telegram?
Too radical a solution for me, I used microG for a long time, but the notification problems made me go back to Google services. i've banned them from accessing camera/microphone/geolocation via App Ops (put them on ignore mode), so I'm pretty calm. but notifications are still a problem).
No, they don't have the same privileges as root permissions. this is easily demonstrated by the camera app built into LineageOS when you enable ignore mode for camera in App Ops and it crashes. and google services also start making very untypical requests for access to stuff.
Yes, but there aren't many apps that respect privacy on my phone compared to the usual ones).