Pay securely with an Android smartphone, completely without Google services: This is the plan being developed by the newly founded industry consortium led by the German Volla Systeme GmbH. It is an open-source alternative to Google Play Integrity. This proprietary interface decides on Android smartphones with Google Play services whether banking, government, or wallet apps are allowed to run on a smartphone.
Honestly if there was an alternate and functional phone/OS/app store that early adopters who are a little technical can embrace, it would be the #1 platform in under 5 years. People in the know are chomping at the bit to get away from these big monopolzed platforms, and once it gains steam and polish, people will flock to it.
There are already alternate app stores, and alternate OS and phones that are functional and niche. The real issue is that the Android people knows is not open source, AOSP is the thing open sourced, but thats far from what we use on a daily basis as Android, and Google makes sure every time it can to put hurdles between functionality and open source, some of those hurdles can and are being worked on, some others are out of reach for the open source community
I’ve never developed on Android, but would it be hard to port most apps to AOSP at this point if the developer wanted to?
AOSP is Android in barebones so apps “work”, the thing is that most apps need services that are developed by Google on top of AOSP (google maps api, notificacion services, google pay) and that are hard to replace because they need costly infraestructure or years of constant development. On top of that Google is promoting/forcing the use of Google Play Protect so more apps need that layer now
most apps already work, and it’s been always that way. those that don’t, it’s because they depend on the google services system app (microg helps here). or they require google play integrity to pass which is not something that can be hacked around, because this is its exact purpose: denying to work on open source aosp systems. it is security, but not for you, but against you.
It’d be effortless.
Yeah so I don’t see what the issue is. If they gave me stock android from 8 years ago I would still be happy to use it, and most basic users probably wouldn’t even know the difference. There are very few features released in the past few years that I couldn’t live without. Probably the only notable one I can think of is notification history. Other than that it has been all downhill, like removing the ability to easily record calls, which iphone can do no problem. As it is now I have to use a differnt phoen a a bunch of hacks to get it to work. It’s my device, let me assume the risk. Nanny bullshit.