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by danvittegleo 2898 days ago
That's a great question. I would say it is a bit limiting, and there are definitely some bumps in the road for the average user coming from stock Android. There are a lot of great open source applications in the F-Droid app store, but it definitely doesn't cover everything you'd expect from a stock phone these days. There is an app, Yalp Store (it downloads APKs directly from Google servers), that can be used to supplement this with normal Play Store apps. Many apps in the Play Store will rely on Google services though, so you will have a wide variety of results ranging from apps running just fine, crashing on boot, or not supporting push notifications. For me, not getting push notifications in Slack was an issue as it relies on Google Cloud Messaging (GCM). Luckily the encrypted chat messengers that I use Signal/Telegram have support for their own polling mechanism and don't rely on GCM. For Slack I ended up just writing a quick tool (https://github.com/dan-v/slack-to-telegram) to forward messages to Telegram so I get immediately alerts. But it's things like that this that you will definitely run into when running without Google services.