[mehrdadn]

> Play services makes sure that things like fine location services work on your phone. It can't be uninstalled or disabled because it's tied much deeper to the os than a normal app, and nothing else offers the same functionality that you can normally install. (There's competitors like microg but you can't install them without having an unlocked bootloader)

Isn't that literally the point? When the complaint is that Google is tying itself to the OS and leaving few viable alternative options, the fact that Google is tying itself to the OS and leaving fewer alternative options is more like an admission rather than a defense...

[skybrian]

It goes deeper than that. Many (most?) Android apps depend on Play Services. If there were an option to remove it, it would basically be a "break most of my phone" option.

To make this viable, at a minimum, it should be possible to search for apps that don't depend on Play Services, so you could remove most of your apps and replace them with alternatives.

But I expect most users wouldn't do this, and so there is little incentive for most apps to stop depending on Play Services. The only real incentive to do it is to be able to publish the app on Amazon.

[chopin]

I think on f-droid you can find only apps which are not dependent on Play Services.