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Comment by nir | Hacker News Reader

As it stands you either give Apple complete control of you software/hardware or you give Google full access to every detail of your life.

There should be a sticker "Don't blame me, I supported Firefox OS"

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I know you're half-joking, but if this is something you're passionate about, there are things you can do (while there's still alternatives platforms...):

1. Purchase non-Apple, and non-Android devices (e.g. Jolla/SailfishOS, Ubuntu Touch devices)

2. Develop software for the alternative platforms -- that's what I do. It's a lot of fun programming on a GNU/Linux mobile. I write software in Python with 3rd party modules from pypi, and Qt/QML.

3. Spread the word. Tell other like-minded developers about how fun it is to work on your alternative platform of choice. Plus since there's only 10s of thousands of users, your software actual gets used (and people appreciate it!).

What GNU/Linux mobile? Can you elaborate on that?

I develop for SailfishOS. As I described in one of my other comments, it really is just "regular" GNU/Linux underneath:

>> I develop software for SailfishOS. It's like the Linux desktop. I SSH into my phone. zypper/pkcon install some dev tools (e.g. gcc, make, git). I initialise a Python virtualenv, pull down some libraries (e.g. Flask). I want to query SMS messages? I open an sqlite database on the filesystem. I can define services using systemd files. It really is "just Linux" underneath.

I had never heard of SailfishOS before this thread. Now I really want to pick up a device with SailfishOS, but I was planning on getting on GoogleFI compatible device in the next couple months. Decisions...

In any case, thank you for your efforts. I've been waiting for UbuntuOS for all the features I didn't know Sailfish has already.

How much of SailfishOS is covered by GPL or GPL compatible license? I don't want to invest my time into someone else business for free.

You can easily disable Google services on most Android devices. Or purchase a Cyanogenmod compatible device and use a third party store.

The problem is that the majority of apps written on Android these days depend on Google APIs or libraries, to the point that an Android without Play Services is almost useless. (Yes, this is from experience.)

Even Google's direct competitors require Google to use an Android. Skype and Outlook are great examples of apps you'd be amazed to discover will not run at all without Play Services.

There are fake GApps that I have tried on experimental devices and they fooled the apps enough to enable them to run. I haven't run these long-term or tried on more than 3 apps relevant to me to say if that would be a good approach.

I'd be a little iffy about security considerations once your plan is to rely on "fake apps".

I am not referring to mysterious binary blobs retrieved from torrents or such but open source projects such as https://github.com/thermatk/FakeGApps (http://repo.xposed.info/module/com.thermatk.android.xf.fakeg...).

People reading HN could, but the general public doesn't really have that option.

Does the general public care though?

Not at all. A lot of people who gather at places like these don't seem to realise that ordinary people have much more pressing problems in life than running a phone OS they can tinker with.

Does push notification still work without google services running?

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