More and more functionality is being shoved into Google Play Services. I have a deGoogled phone running Lineage, but even with that, no Google Play Services, and some custom settings (like changing the captive portal URLs), there's still network traffic to Google. Add in relative unknowns like AGPS and the situation gets even worse. I also have no push notifications for most apps, have to keep a static notification so Android doesn't kill apps like my email client, AND still run micro-G for basic functionality to work. Oh, and thanks to SafetyNet there are still apps that refuse to run, even with systemless "undetectable" root.
Android itself might be really good, but it's pretty obvious that deGoogled phones have a strong chance of being functionally useless in the future.
The ratio of available apps of Android without gapps over pinephone is still more than 1000 fold, despite SafetyNet or other reliances on Google.
For push notifications, microg does fill the gap, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. UnifiedPush is coming to fill this gap without violating Google's ToC, with self-hosting, and fully FLOSS. Is anything like that coming to PinePhone or Librem?
The Google phone-home "features" can be removed, and this is exactly the point of this thread. Android is opensource, you can control this platform however you want, especially removing all connections to Google services.
I'm guessing what you're saying is that you installed some custom Android ROM, and expected it to remove any Google tracker, but that's a wrong assumption, most Android ROMs don't target deGoogling.
Even my AOSP GSI, with FLOSS variant doesn't target removing Google phone-home features. Why? I don't approve of any data collection on Google's DNS, AGPS, or generate 204, which means it is illegal for them to use it to track me without my consent, and I believe that they are not total outlaws. Running a DNS, AGPS, or even generate 204 reliable infrastructure is hard.
> I have a deGoogled phone running Lineage, but even with that, no Google Play Services, and some custom settings (like changing the captive portal URLs), there's still network traffic to Google.
I'm running LineageOS without Play Services too and didn't about know this!
Do you have any reference materials (I guess getting busy with Wireshark and the source is my next step)? I found this Reddit thread[1] talking about a connectivity check but am keen to start tracking down any others.
Android itself might be really good, but it's pretty obvious that deGoogled phones have a strong chance of being functionally useless in the future.