Finally, all the 10 people who were waiting for this can use Signal.
Then after you do what the people emailing you wanted, all the people who were silent chime in. "Wait a minute, why were you spending your time on that? None of us wanted it!"
That's why it always feels like marco1 described.
Because of that, it doesn't make sense for application developers to support the use case.
Because of that, lots of applications don't work without Google Play Services.
Because of that, few people use phones without Google Play Services.
(And then people complain about the lack of open Android alternatives, or that other OSs such as Sailfish do not take off despite doing crazy things to support Android applications.)
All the applications I try and that require stuff from google they just crash randomly or at some specific options. I just uninstall them or try to be very careful for them not to crash. It's horrible experience and it's not something so hard to prepare for. Some apolications handle it showing that an action can't be done and I'm ok with it, that's simple, but crashing because the services are not installed is just plain ridiculous, lazy and bad engeneering.
Once upon a time slack just worked fine, just didn't auto refreshed updates, then on one update it started crashing and currently since a while ago an annoying message appears everytime I focus/open the apllication saying that I don't have the play services despite the application working completly fine. The proper thing to do would just to be a messsge saying something like: " the app requires google services, the quality of the experience will be reduced and actions FOO and BAR will not work. options: continue anyway, exit and continue and remeber that option" in order for it to be persintent and stop being annoying. Not that hard.
I just endup not using a bunch of applications that I would like to. Apps that use maps or or try to get location will usually just crash. I never even installed Uber or tried it because I'm pretty sure it will just not work, so I didn't even try it.
microG is the best thing I could hope for, but I really tried to use it but was not able too. It requires something about signing or whatever that just didn't work after I tried a lot doing things with Xposed or what it was called. Even getting to a point where that almost worked was crazy.
I'm pretty sure the experience will be pretty similar in any other alternative OS that has to deal with this crazy environment.
And I will never get a "real" android where that thing will come installed, I refuse to. I was thinking of changing phones to some android based thing, but the support of hardware is very limited, so I'm pretty stuck. Waiting for any newer Jolla phone or any other alternative phone/OS that works.
It's basically just installing the APK, although there are a few more steps than I thought I remembered.