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Comment by danvittegleo | Hacker News Reader

This cross platform tool provisions all of the AWS infrastructure required to build your own personal privacy focused Android OS on a continuous basis with OTA updates. It currently supports Pixel phones (Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel 2, Pixel 2XL). Highlights include:

* Verified boot (https://source.android.com/security/verifiedboot/) like stock Android (almost all ROMs disable this) and with your own signing keys

* Latest monthly security updates from Google

* OTA updates from S3

* No Google services

* Latest F-Droid as open source alternative to Google Play store

* Latest Chromium w/ adblocking and privacy patches

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> * No Google services

Question about this - my blackberry q10 had an android vm on it but the limitation of "no google services" meant that unless the app used none of those APIs it would not run. Surprisingly this was very limiting - have you had a similar experience?

That's a great question. I would say it is a bit limiting, and there are definitely some bumps in the road for the average user coming from stock Android. There are a lot of great open source applications in the F-Droid app store, but it definitely doesn't cover everything you'd expect from a stock phone these days. There is an app, Yalp Store (it downloads APKs directly from Google servers), that can be used to supplement this with normal Play Store apps. Many apps in the Play Store will rely on Google services though, so you will have a wide variety of results ranging from apps running just fine, crashing on boot, or not supporting push notifications. For me, not getting push notifications in Slack was an issue as it relies on Google Cloud Messaging (GCM). Luckily the encrypted chat messengers that I use Signal/Telegram have support for their own polling mechanism and don't rely on GCM. For Slack I ended up just writing a quick tool (https://github.com/dan-v/slack-to-telegram) to forward messages to Telegram so I get immediately alerts. But it's things like that this that you will definitely run into when running without Google services.

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