Basically, what the title says. Do you use any app, that is proprietary, but either has no OSS alternatives or they’re all not good enough? If there is an alternative, what keeps you from switching?
Basically, what the title says. Do you use any app, that is proprietary, but either has no OSS alternatives or they’re all not good enough? If there is an alternative, what keeps you from switching?
MicroG works really well
MicroG works well if you let it leak some data to Google.
I would like a free-as-in-free-from-Google Google Play Services reimplementation that lets me use any app that depends on it without hitting any Google server.
OP asked about Open Source not about privacy.
MicroG minimises connections to google servers, here you can read what addresses it still connects to and why: https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/wiki/Google-Network-Connections
Free software (not open-source, it’s really free software that’s important) that depends on a single for-profit vendor is not free.
MicroG is open-source but it’s not free. It fails to address two problems:
I don’t think OP cares about getting the source of the apps they run so much as the apps being free-as-in-libre in his original question. Many people mistake open-source for free software and MicroG is not truly free.
(I reread ops question and I can only see the term open source 2 times, but whatever, I understand what you say, and I don’t want to debate about semantics.)
The point with microG is it’s still the best way if you want to use android. The other options are:
And maybe tomorrow we’ll see UP grow up, removing one more piece from google. And the day after, another piece.