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Comment by KingHenryVIII | Hacker News Reader

What a hopelessly naive perspective. Android has always been about ensuring the Google surveillance operation doesn't get shut out of mobile. The whole OS is designed to enable snooping on the user not just while in the browser, but at all times.

The fact that they've had to build actual hardware that functions at times, and includes things like driver stacks is purely incidental to the main mission. Try seeing how willing they are to add support for chipsets on phones that don't include Google Services.

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> What a hopelessly naive perspective.

Maybe, but I was there, helping it develop in the early days, which is the time span we're talking about. I can tell you the core of the Android team was fighting to keep it open -- so much so that about three years in one of the guys who dedicated his job to open sourcing drivers and kernel patches burnt out because of it.

What Android is about is decidedly not what Play Services and GCM core are about.

> Try seeing how willing they are to add support for chipsets on phones that don't include Google Services

It's always been the system integrator's job to work with the OEM vendors to integrate drivers and functionality into Android -- not the Android team's. Even on Glass we had to do this as though we were outside system integrators.

too bad more and more of android was moved into play services over time

It wasn't. Play services is just add on features that proxy app permissions and centralize push notifications -- no actual Android features moved into Play services that I know of. Ie: auto filling SMS OTP codes. It feels like Android is being sucked up that way, but that's because there are a lot of really nice features in there, like push notifications, geofencing, etc.

You can still run Android without GMS core and Play services -- I do that, myself, on a Pixel 3a running Graphene. The trick is that you lose some nice functionality (which Android actually makes up for in some cases, ie: SMS OTP copy buttons), and the mapping experience is god-awful (mostly because the OSS mapping scene is hopelessly stuck in the 1990s GPS model)

one example i can think of without having to look things up is that the music player used to be part of AOSP and then got replaced with a google play variant

e: here's an article from 2018 with some more examples:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...

So the old music player isn't still included by default. It should still work just fine on modern android if you install it, and there's plenty of foss media players on fdroid (ie not Google-dependent), most of them thin wrappers around the android media apis with a few extras like playlists. Kodi and VLC should work fine without Google services, and LineageOS Eleven doesn't require Google, though I'm not sure if it still works on modern Android.

Lack of media playback options shouldn't be able to stop you from using AOSP.

What would get open-source mapping out of this "1990s GPS model"?

Stop geocoding by separating out addresses into singular fields, for one. Stop showing mostly irrelevant contours on maps, for another. OsmAnd~ is unfortunately the only game in town, and the UX is freaking terrible.

how do i get SMS OTP copy buttons on my google-free android device?

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