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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Google is slowly cripling everything opensource and replacing it with its own closed source stuff. Many, many apps won't run without google blobs on the phone and it's all by design.

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You can always swap those our with other apps from f-droid or something though and if you're willing to run an open source phone you're largely going to be dealing with the same problems in that department - lack of apps. And that's not to mention MicroG which makes many such apps work anyways.

This is true for eg. a browser, alarm app and an irc client.

If you want banking apps to work, you're fucked. Even getting some of the mainstream social network and chat apps to work without google play services is a pain.

> If you want banking apps to work, you're fucked. Even getting some of the mainstream social network and chat apps to work without google play services is a pain.

GrapheneOS seems to do pretty well with this. It is a bit more involved and you have to check the docs but you can generally get banking apps to work just fine.

While I don't disagree with your sentiment, this is kinda like claiming that Canonical is crippling Open Source by offering Snaps on Ubuntu. There is still a significant portion of Android that is perfectly usable in an open fashion. In fact, I might even say that there is no clear path for Google to close off Android as a project.

But even now, many social networks, chat apps, and especially banking apps don't work without google play services. Yes, you can circumvent some of the requirements using different workarounds and hacks (micro G, app patching, etc.), but in some cases, even the basics (such as notifications on new messages) don't work without some google-based blob somewhere.

Banking apps et al have decided that without remote attestation, they do not want to expose the functionality their customers expect from them. Mostly because of confused threat models, and banks being banks are often erring on the side of safety. And chat/socials just want to evade the bots. An open source platform would have to provide similar attestation capabilities, as stupid as they are, people in suits will manage risks.

Not just attestation, also location services are usually via play services and also notifications (because noone wants to implement their own). I agree about the banks... if you root the phone after the banking app works, you can still extract all the keys, and usually with a magisk plugin or two, you can use the app too on a rooted phone... but not without google play services.

Maybe we need some more economic conflicts, for huawei and xiaomi to switch to their own "play services", and the developers will have to code apps that work on all android variants, not just google-based ones.

> There is still a significant portion of Android that is perfectly usable in an open fashion

There's not a single phone on earth running AOSP, you can't really compare it to Ubuntu. It's not made for tinkering or user ownership.

> There's not a single phone on earth running AOSP

Sure there are: https://developer.android.com/topic/generic-system-image/

Can you point me a reference to a single phone? A phone running AOSP with open-source kernel drivers and not a single Google closed-source binary. Good luck to find that.

The only project I know about doing that is Replicant and targets ancient phones. It's also a community run project, none of those phone came fully open from the factory either.

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