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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

I had a similar experience with GrapheneOS on my pixel 6 pro.

It got multi-day battery life out of the box, which is far in excess of what Google advertises for that hardware.

Once I installed google play services (which have zero end-user benefit, other than enabling compatibility with apps that have bundled google spyware), battery life more than halved, bringing it in line with what Google claims.

I suspect anti-trust and consumer protection lawsuits would start flying around if more people realized that over 50% of their phone battery was there to support malicious bundled code.

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Cloud messaging comes with Google Play Services. That alone could explain the battery difference.

Maybe you are Ok with paying for every app or making do with open sources ones that do not benefit from ad revenue stream. Plus, you don't need maps, pay or cast support. But many other people like this features and if they don't, isn't it great that there are working AOSP builds for Pixel 6 Pro so that they can roll their own ROMs on top of that? No need to hack like for Windows 11.

Why would maps (get lat/long from GPS chip when navigating / searching), cast and pay need to burn battery when the phone is idle?

(Also, third party implementations of maps, such as organic maps and here we go can install and run fine without impacting battery life when they are not running.)

The answer is that the actually-useful features are bundled with mandatory malware that does need to run in the background in order to implement 24/7 surveillance. That bundling clearly violates US antitrust law.

Also, I suspect most people buying > $1000 phones would be willing to pay 10’s of dollars for lifetime licenses for maps, pay and cast (which is roughly what they would cost as standalone products), especially if they were privacy preserving, and doubled the phone’s battery life.

maps work perfectly fine on my no gapps phone, so does Whatsapp or signal

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