I think he has valid critique.
Android is an open source system with proprietary extensions.
The latter is OK, because it’s Google’s business model, and people are free to build a phone or phone ROM without it. (LineageOS for example)
Or people are forced to do it without it because of political reasons, for example because a US embargo forbids Google to do business with you.
Some people might simply opt to want a phone without Google - for whatever reason (trust, privacy, political, …), and (since so far no alternate ROM is available) uninstalling or disabling the proprietary apps from Android is the only option.
The issue is, the update mechanism Fairphone uses to update Fairphone 3 only works with this proprietary google extension, which is installed in a privileged way.
That being said, how privileged are google play services (formerly known as google service framework) actually? Could a user install an open source app and use that to trigger updates (providing the update URL manually) the same way he/she could use adb to sideload the update from the recovery system?
I think that should be possible, after all the google play services don’t run as root, but should be using an android API call which needs enhanced (device administrator) privileges that the app can be given by the user.
worth looking into.
Edit: This is what LineageOS uses: https://github.com/LineageOS/android_packages_apps_Updater
Edit again: You don’t need proprietary stuff to install updates. The capability is exposed through
https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/RecoverySystem
and
and android.os.UpdateEngine
there is an underlying daemon process running with root privileges, but that is open source:
https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/update_engine/
So, long story short, you don’t really need Google Play Services, you could write your own app to do it. (Edit: But because Fairphone uses Google Services to announce updates, this would possibly require significant amounts of reverse engineering, see https://habr.com/en/post/446790/
)
Another issue is that Fairphone utilizes google cloud to provide information which updates are available to phones and lets them download it. But while that is using google services server side, they can be queried from third party apps as well.