Signal uses Play Services for its push notifications. It does have a fallback method which maintains a connection to their servers to get message notifications. It requires changing some battery optimisation settings which might have some minor battery impacts.

Personally I'm using Molly which implements UnifiedPush for Push Notifications without Molly/Signal needing to run in the background constantly. Also swaps a few other Google dependencies (like location pins) with open source alternatives.

Having the second profile with Google Services is a good idea though. That was what I used to do before I shed my last few Google dependencies.

I've just started using beets for organizing my collection. It's relatively easy once you get the hang of it. Ease I suppose differs based on how organised/tagged your collection is currently.

I'd quite like to see the voting age lowered to 16. I'd lean towards it being made compulsory over allowing voluntary voting in Australia.

As the one expert mentioned we could use some more education on voting in the curriculum to help prepare students for it. Teaching them how prefferential voting works, how to research candidates, etc.

You can install pretty much any user agent switcher extension on Firefox for Android.

I downloaded FossWallet off F-Droid last week for an annual pass I bought. It only supports Apple Passkey files, but if they offer Google Wallet they'll usually offer that too.

I set this up on my Steam Deck when I first got it. It plays really well on the deck.

Another vote for Happy Cow. Makes it easy to bookmark a few places near where you're staying and planning to visit.

There was also another app I used to use which I think was called something like vegan passport? It had written in a bunch of languages that you were vegan and what that meant in good detail. Haven't been able to find it again last time I checked though.

They forked it

CoMaps is a recent fork of Organic Maps. So those two are pretty similar at the moment in terms of functionality. Osmand I would say has a lot more features and customisation options, but Organic/CoMaps is faster and more responsive.