If we look at it from a privacy perspective ( Telemetry, Spyware, list of privacy threats on FP3 Android 9 )
I think the main reason people would want a custom ROM without gaps probably is privacy - otherwise simply rooting the device would be enough.
However gaps are unfortunately not the only spyware on the phone. At least with the google spying you sort of know where it goes, and google at least gives you some control over the data they collected through the google account. Also it’s kinda “under control” as disabling the google-play-services - or denying network access to google play services - as well as a hand full of other nosy apps ( keyboard, location services, ‘find my device’, …) - actually turns that off. (A VPN based firewall can do that, don’t even need root)
But unfortunately, like probably 90% of devices now, FP3 is a Qualcomm phone, and the qualcom stuff is rooted much deeper in the system - mostly on the vendor partition. There is spyware on the phone that are not apps but a system service running - some of it even with root privileges.
And as a privacy aware user I would like to get rid of that crap. But a GSI solution that keeps FP3’s vendor partition untouched won’t allow that. It would replace google’s frontend with LOS and remove the gapps, but the “rootkit” installed by qualcomm is still armed (worst case scenario)
This isn’t trivial, since qualcomm’s “security features” are deeply interlinked with DRM featurs the phone has. using stuff like the QSEECOM lib and the matching kernel driver, etc… - all provided by proprietary libraries. This is a cesspool that gets deeper and deeper when you go in the direction of cell-modem and firmware.
And I really don’t know what to do there. It’s possible that some of the spy-features are part of proprietary libraries the phone won’t even work without, since they control critical hardware features.
As such I don’t really know what to say with the poll. A LineagePort using GSI would certainly neat and quick but since it leaves the qualcomm vendor stuff in place, it would kinda be like putting a band aid over a wound, without removing the splinters of depleted uranium first.
But FP3 can’t be the first qualcomm phone that people had this problem - and discussion with. Is there a list of the different features - QSECOM, video libs, drm stuff, modem userspace stuff, etc… listing
- what they do
- if they are required for the phone to work (or can just be ommitted / replaced by a software only variant)
- if there is an open source alternative
- etc…