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Its comments like "it’s also on the way to become a proprietary operating system" which turn me off supporting something like MicroG. I like the idea, but it such a gross mischaracterization of Android and it leads to uninformed people to believe weird things. Over on Reddit I often see people thinking Play Services is absolutely required to make an Android app. Which is just not true, I know from personally experience that Play Services is easily replaceable with other App Store SDKs. Also as you have said, Play Services deals solely with communication with Google.

It also reminds me of when Cyanogen became a business. It was sorta interesting at first until I listened to the CEO talking about putting a bullet in Google's head. Now Cyanogen tries to sell app space on its users devices.

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Mischaracterization in what sense?

With the new deep Doze modes in Android, FCM is becoming integral to stuff as simple as push notifications (since FCM is supposed to be what wakes up the phone).

The APIs that let you do stuff like nearby communication are also getting locked down. From 6 and up you can't get a Bluetooth MAC address for Rfcomm without a system level permission, conveniently Googles Nearby API gladly gets around that.

I work on hardware without Play Services and I think what you're forgetting is stuff like FCM requires Play Services. FCM isn't an end all be all BaaS, but it's getting more and more ingrained in how Android works, and it's a little scary

Google is constantly pushing their proprietary APIs so a lot apps in practice only work with play services, if you even can get hold of them without the Play store app. they also abandon more and more of the AOSP builtin Apps, new features and are added mostly only to the proprietary counterparts. So a lot of things people might attribute to Android are in fact part of the Google Apps. The direction is clear and AOSP is entirely controlled by google, they could simply decide to not open the next Version or parts of it.

I know from personal experience how hard it is to actually use AOSP phone. I eventually gave up, installed microG and started using apk mirrors, which makes things a lot better, though not ideal yet.

There's F-Droid which is bringing some hope, but pure AOSP with F-Droid still cannot even compete with Nokia N900.

Yes, what does that have to do with Android becoming a "proprietary operating system". Web services are integral in a modern smart phone. Google adds their own to Android. Others do as well, for example MicroG, Amazon, MIUI, etc.

I tried rolling the Google-free Android strategy for a while, but I found it was so unusable I took the first non-iPhone path off Android I could find. It's just too much frustration to try to deal with all the missing pieces. Currently I'm using a Lumia 929, but I'd kill for like an Ubuntu phone or something that works on Verizon.

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