before steering this discussion into any single specific direction, I would be curious to hear your opinions on this topic in general (i.e. without stating my specific issue yet ;)).
why should I use FP Open, if I need OpenGAPPS for the play store anyway? (And by that let the infamous play services back into my phoneâŠ)
hey, thanks for your replies
âwhich OpenGAPPSâ is not really an argument, is it? As soon as you install even Pico, you will have the full google-calling-home package (Play Services) â wonât you? Thatâs where my original question comes from. The only reason I see to go OSOS is to get rid of google.
(+ easy way to get root â anything else?)
You do need it for Signal for example :\
And if you say you install, e.g. WhatsApp from APK â who is doing the push-service for you? (Fairphone?)
I donât know Signal, but I know Whatsapp, Kontalk and Threema. They all do not need the push-service, it is recognized by those apps, that GMS is not present (and therefor no push-service) and so they switch to âpollâ. Works good.
Before one can rightfully state that âyou do or donât need the play storeâ one has to define âyouâ and âneedâ and differentiate between âplay storeâ and âplay servicesâ.
âYouâ can be a person who is used to having all the fancy apps that come from the play store or a person who uses apps that do the same but come from different - less fancy - sources.
The feeling of âneedâ-ing a specific app can be caused by not knowing any alternatives that offer the same feature or by being restricted by the environment (peer pressure, workplace, âŠ) to use a specific app.
Needing the âplay storeâ is only true for apps that you canât download from anywhere else (nowadays I donât believe there are any), while âneeding play servicesâ means that the app refuses (for no apparent reason) to work if it doesnât detect play services on the phone. This can usually be circumvented by installing the free microg services. (AFAIK they do integrate some proprietary Google services but do so in a controlled environment so they canât communicate any personal data to Googleâs servers)
That could be microg. If interested check 5.5 in this guide.
good to know, thanks. I wonder how much of a difference this makes for battery life?
@paulakreuzer: yes, definitely agreed. at the moment i have the play store disabled on my phone and i am using f-droid.
yeah, well⊠Signal :\
if it wasnât for Signal, which i really wanted to use as it seems to be the only messenger that keeps all of your data private, then i would already have installed FPOOS and be done with it. It is really bizarre how open whisper systems puts so much energy into developing a privacy-enforcing app and then decide to only make it available to users who use the play services
maybe, if you could build signal from source and use ”G â does anybody know?
this might be a silly question: will GPS work w/o play services? i.e. specifically navigation using OsmAnd?
I donât use âSignalâ, prefere âThreemaâ, but if you want to download âSignalâ, you can do it with the âapkpureâ store instead of âPlay Storeâ!
thanks, yes, the download should not be the problem â you should also be able to build it from source, as it is open source. the question is whether it will work without GCM :\
One advantage of OpenOS with OpenGApps pico is that the phone is rooted. I for example have this setup with Xposed and Xprivacy. With Xprivacy I can control the permission requests of apps. Now I can use the Play Store (and GPlay services) to get my apps (running), but I can control which data Google sends to its servers with Xprivacy which is pretty cool
Also, donât be fooled: Signal doesnât anonymize any metadata and itâs centralized. Snowden used it because he ran it over Tor. So using Signal means at least Google (by GCM) and Open Whispers Systems (by their servers) have access to the metadata of your comms.
âItâs very good, I know the security model,â Snowden said about Signal. âThey donât protect you from metadata association, but they do strongly protect your content from precisely this type of in-transit interception,â he said.
I wouldnât be completely sure about that. Google Apps are privileged apps on your system, meaning that they can do whatever they want (without you knowing because their source is not open, obviously) because they are in reality apps with superuser rights.
âŠwant access to your contacts?
Instead of dealing with the normal Android API for that (which is the one you can block with XPrivacy), they can directly read the contacts provider database. Itâs a SQL query after allâŠ
âŠunless I block their internet access?
Nope. Google Apps are interconnected. Thereâs a module, Google Play Services, which seems to be the central one (because the others depend on that), but Iâm sure if you block Internet access to this module, Google Play will refuse to work.
Disclaimer: I might be mistaken in the practical issues. Iâve been living without Google for two years already, Iâm not familiar with their actual design, although I suspect it hasnât changed pretty muchâŠ
Good point. And interesting that they make it sound like they would by reassurung that they do not log any metadata (they say). They recently published a subpoena they got served with along with the information that they do not have any information on their users apart from registration date and time of last login.
OK, not logging is still better than logging. But still, I feel more and more inclined to going FPOOS completely w/o Google and then using WhatsApp and swallow the pill that they do log and analyze meta data.
But then the filter option to only show system apps for controlling would be useless⊠But I can make an experiment: Iâll download this crappy new Whatsapp-clone from Google (âAlloâ) ant let it try to collect my calendar data. Since it is from Google it would directly take the data from GPlay services which are controlled by Xprivacy.
EDIT: This wonât work because Google already synced my contacts when I was on normal FPOS whithout asking me
What they show you could be completely different to what they have about you,
Iâm talking here about technical possibilities, because legal and ethical donât apply in the case of a company; companies are not tied to ethical practices (Fairphone wouldnât exist, if that was the case) and NSA already broke USAâs fourth amendment, anyway. We cannot trust law, but we can trust technology.
no Google mobile services I set to 1
poll and no Google Mobile services: +5%
push and Google mobile services: +50%
Edit: Iâm talking about the current, so +5% means: battery drains 5% faster.
Yes!
Be careful with apps from a company!
If they give you something as a gift for free then this is economically wrong. A company has to gain money! So if they give somthing for free, they have to gain money in another way and thatâs - with www - your data!
Google, Whisper, Wire.com, Ghostery, Mobotap Inc, WoT, and so on âŠ
hey, thanks for the info on the battery! how to read it, though? do you mean that with push and GMS turned on the battery last 50% longer or it drains faster?