I use lineage, but not microg. Things like Conversations poll effectively enough and it keeps me off the Google.

I feel like this isn't a solution for the planned obsolescence inherent in mobile devices though. Every release after Google officially drops support (and provides their own image) gets exponentially harder. The amount of things moving out of AOSP and into Play services grows every month too.

Conversations keeps open a TCP connection and the server pushes new messages. The only kind of polling is a ping to keep the connection alive which can be scaled based on how often it proves to be necessary on that connection. It works the same way as GCM. GCM isn't inherently more efficient than an app doing it, but with GCM it's one connection across all apps using it for push vs. each app doing it on their own. Conversations is also one of the few doing it very well without GCM. Most have a much lazier implementation of push or worse they don't do push at all and really do poll.

Thanks for the update and sorry for the misinformation. The performance is much better than the few apps I've seen advertise "non-GCM" so I definitely believe it.

I wouldn't say its complicated. Just have to patch with https://github.com/ale5000-git/tingle after every update to keep the fake google signature working.

Do the features micro-G provides require only installable software, or is there a service component that's provided/required?

Any advice and/or helpful links for installing microG? I've found the microG documentation a little less than helpful.

Just install F-droid using the apk from the official site, add the repo [1], refresh the package list if this was not done automatically by F-droid, and install GmsCore along with GsfProxy in F-droid.

[1]: You can use the QR code here to avoid typing the URL into F-droid: https://github.com/microg/android_packages_apps_GmsCore/wiki...

LineageOS has given my S5 a new lease on life. Bit of a pain to install on a Verizon phone though.