[askvictor]

Not certain why the downvotes; apart from community ROMs and Amazon's Android devices, Samsung has been positioning itself for some time to not be completely reliant on Google for it's phone business - they have an App Store of their own and their own duplicate functionality of many of Google's core services for Android. I wouldn't be surprised if they de-coupled from Google entirely at some point (yes, they'd need to convince developers over to their app store, but they're playing the long game)

[ReverseCold]

I read the Samsung privacy policy, it's honestly not much better.

Is there a project to replace all of play services with FOSS/encrypted ones?

[_bxg1]

There is, called MicroG. Although personally I don't use it on my google-less phone because it's a bit messy/early in development.

You can make do (as I do) with LineageOS, F-Droid, and APKMirror. The last is run by the AndroidPolice folks and is therefore trustworthy.

[askvictor]

True Samsung's not any better, but diversity is a good thing; if they have an alternative in place then they could much more easily provide competition with Google in this space (after all, Samsung sells hardware and doesn't really need to harvest your data)