The notifications Signal pops up, with contact name and message text, are generated from within the app itself, not sent via Google.

It does receive some Firebase messages from Google, but not the type that automatically pops up a notification. Instead these are silent ones that trigger the app to perform a particular action, such as fetching any new Signal messages from Signal's servers.

That's great to know, thanks!

> notifications going through Google

That has never crossed my mind. Do notifications on Android normally go through Google servers? As in could be spied or data mined on?

Yes, unfortunately the platform providers are the only battery-efficient way of doing notifications on mobile phones.

I suppose you're talking about push notifications to save battery life instead of an app that is constantly polling for new messages?

I don't think all notifications are push notifications, and those that are would be https encrypted between the host and client, so any e2ee message would have to be decrypted on device before showing a notification, google should not have access to this, but of course it comes back to whether you should trust anything software tells you.

I might be wrong here, see sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33123325