I've recently been attempting to gradually liberate my data from reliance on Google's services, not just for being more privacy conscious but by a means of exploring new services offered by other companies/developers and to decentralise my data. I've started this process by installing Lineage OS on my OPX device and selected the bare-minimum of Google Services - Google Play Store/Services.
From what I've done so far I imagine it's quite difficult to remove dependency on Google Play Services and I've been wondering, which alternatives exist and what's the rationale behind completely removing dependence on Google Play Services? With Lineage OS I've been able to restrict most permissions besides storage so is there any need to remove it?
There is no need for any Google software. Just install lineageOS, then install f-droid and from f-droid install Yalp Store. From Yalp you can install any app from Google Play, should you want to.
I just looked through the source code real quick, and while I may have missed something it seems to be storing the credentials client side, not server side. Unless you mean on Google's servers, then yeah.
To be fair I don't think it has been available that long in f-droid.
My previous hack was two phones. One clean and one with Google Play. Both with f-droid as f-droid has this wonderful feature of copying one apk to another over WiFi.
it provides a location service that works without google and they re-built the play services and maps API, so you don't have to have any google apps installed at all. for those apps that actually need to talk to google servers, there's an option for that.
Have you had any experience setting up an Android device to use microG? Their installation instructions on Github make it seem like a huge hassle. (e.g. You need a custom ROM that supports app impersonation, which is usually prohibited on security/privacy conscious distributions.)
yes. in short, it didn't work for me. either your ROM supports that out of the box (mine didn't), or you install xposed (should be rather simple with their installer, but didn't work for me, likely because my five year old device isn't supported), or you patch your ROM manually to enable "app impersonation" (signature spoofing), that didn't work for me either.
but the xposed route should be simple, provided you have root access.
From what I've done so far I imagine it's quite difficult to remove dependency on Google Play Services and I've been wondering, which alternatives exist and what's the rationale behind completely removing dependence on Google Play Services? With Lineage OS I've been able to restrict most permissions besides storage so is there any need to remove it?