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by morserer 1041 days ago
F-Droid → Aurora Store for all your Play Store needs. No login needed.
1 comments

Thanks!

Do you get many apps that complain about not having Google Play Services installed? Just had one (not Magic Earth). Seems to work fine after I hit "OK" to dismiss its message. I'm assuming it only requires it for auto installing updates.

Google Play Services implements a lot of increasingly vital features and interfaces on Android. Not having it kills a good number of things people consider important, like push notifications (some apps are designed to still send push notifications like Signal, but it's kind of a hack and does drain the battery). If you're looking for almost the same functionality without google play services, MicroG[1] is an open source implementation of Google Play Services and its' associated components. I don't think it works on GrapheneOS unfortunately, but GrapheneOS already sandboxes all the Google Play Services components, so you should be fine as is. "Normal"/stock Android roms aren't set up the same way however, so you pretty much need either Google Play Services or MicroG for push notifications, location services, etc.

[1] - https://microg.org/

I do but ordinarily for services that are not anonymous in the first place. Banking, ride-sharing, so on.