I mean, you are right in this sense I guess. I see this topic from the POV of an arch user in the original sense: I installed the OS myself and made concious decisions about how I built up my OS, I by default read the wiki, I know why and how I do what in my system installation. From my POV it is obvious that there is no problem here. But maybe due to the rise of the user friendly arch-based OS-es (which is an oxymoron in my opinion) the current state of the OS should be reevaluated.

In the end, my opinion still is that if you use tools like yay, you are probably not the target audience, and maybe got lured into using arch due to the memes or stigma. Maybe the entry barrier should be lifted in the sense that for example the AUR and archinstall are split off the project into their separate own thing. Weird situation IMO…

The arch wiki page for the AUR has a big, vibrant red box in the intro section stating:

Warning AUR packages are user-produced content. These PKGBUILDs are completely unofficial and have not been thoroughly vetted. Any use of the provided files is at your own risk.

If you have ever installed something through the AUR in the intended way, you would know that it does not involve running the package manager tool until the very last step. You need to git checkout the package recipe, build it. This is clearly what the post you are answering to meant by “not part of the arch linux repositories”.

I wouldn’t really categorise it as a fuckup. These are unofficial packages from the AUR. You should trust them as much as random install scripts from a no-name website or git repo.

I don’t want to fault you, I just want to point out that Hyprland is in version 0.x. It’s essentially in development. Expecting software in alpha phase to be backwards compatible is a bit unrealistic :) If you enjoyed it that much, come back to it in a few years once it comes out of development phase (if ever…)

It might be not this simple in case of notification providers, the notifications are somehow sent in the name of the app I guess. And don’t forget: in general, this principle is true for most of your apps that send notifications. I.e. if you are getting Signal or Facebook notifications, it uses the same principle.

Btw, google is not the only notification service for android. Check up on Unified Push, there are many alternatives to do this, and there are some apps that support these alternatives in their non-play-store builds.

In general, notifications on Android don’t go through apps, that would require apps to run all the time and consume too much battery. They instead are going through a notification provider (google in the default case). This is why your notifications arrive, but you have no other connections to your HA.

Edit for clarification: HA uploads it to google servers (which of course doesn’t need port forwarding) and your phone then polls them from google.