Molly is a security-hardened Signal client only on Android for people unfamiliar. They went through a period of not updating (there were no security updates during that time afaict), but now releases should happen faster on top of Signal.

In Molly there's three options. Google Play Services, WebSocket, and UnifiedPush.

I use the WebSocket and Molly has used >1% of battery since the last full charge so it doesn't seem like play services would improve battery but maybe if I had more apps depending on it..

Google and Apple can't see the notification content but they can see metadata. If you want metadata privacy you should use SimpleX instead anyway.

If you're using WebSocket, how do Google and Apple see metadata? Can someone explain why it's so difficult to make a decent chat app divorced from their ecosystems?