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Comment by dishanr | Hacker News Reader

May be the OEMs can sell phones without Google apps for a lower price if they choose to increase the device price to include them. I'd buy one!

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Google already locked down Android pretty badly. Many important apps require the Play Store and all that Google stuff to be installed or to be fully functional (e.g notifications). MicroG is not enough for my needs and they introduce new things like SafetyNet to make things even worse. To me that's WAY more important than Google being installed by default or not. They can't lose until you fix this.

I've always heard people happy with microg, people dissatisfied with the complicated procedure of installation, but never anyone that could that was unhappy.

What did it lack, for you?

Don't get me wrong, I think MicroG is a great project and could work for many people. I already have to maintain a lot of Linux related stuff and I really don't want to worry about my phone too. The apps or workflow changes completely when you get rid of Google. I need to be able to trust that making the switch will be permanent, these things add up quickly (time). Death by a thousand cuts.

But if my phone fails it can put my job or even my life in risk. I can't affort to play cat and mouse with Google or the edge cases from and between MicroG and custom ROMs. I took a quick look at their issue tracker and it looks like these things still happen occasionally. As expected because no code will be good enough to fight malice in a platform you don't own.

I'm using microg, and it works for many but not all apps. For instance my bank apps still demand Play Services be installed.

Impractical. You're a tech savvy individual. Regular folks will find it friction laden to install an app store via sideloading

The phone would still come with an app store; it just wouldn't be the Play Store. Amazon is probably calling all the phone vendors already. Carriers might also like to take back control of the store.

Amazon/other store is not a compelling sales pitch to the end user. I myself wouldn't recommend the average user anything outside Google play, as it's light years ahead in selection, security, UX ...

True, though couldn't the manufacturer ship a phone with F-Droid installed?

The infrastructure and user experience is too bad to do that.

I feel that fdroid ought to be split up into two different projects. Their client and all the user facing stuff is terrible. What they are good at is compiling good apks. That should be their primary focus. ie., Building high quality apks that are free and reproducible. Someone else should do the client

When did you last try it? It's improved a lot recently. E.g. upgrading a lot of apps now requires only a single tap; you don't have to download/install/confirm install each one manually.

I use it regularly. It's a bit better, but I really would like to bypass the client altogether if possible. I don't want to sound too critical/ungrateful for something that is free in all senses of the word, but it does leave a lot to be desired. Main gripes: Their repo is either down or slow quite often. The client will just keep spinning until force closed. The new UI is worse (when is it not ? I can't remember a recent project whose new UI is better) Too many steps to do basic stuff. Entire blank page devoted to nearby (p2p) stuff, which I have no use for. Inconsistent links for issues, changelog etc., that can lead anywhere (either the upstream project, f-droid's version of the project, or some random website). Lot of other issues too that will get too long to get into here.

Phone manufacturer support may change that.

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