[akimbostrawman]

>No Google Maps or Android Auto on my phones, so I don't care much about privileged access - they have none anyway.

You don't seem to understand how play service / MicroG work. Maps or Auto Apps aren't the ones having the privilaged access but Play Service and MicroG.

>NetGuard would warn me if it did. I would assume it is not even running when I disable it

Since play services/microg have higher privileges than NetGuard they could just bypass it.

>But avoiding Google (and other big tech) is the reason I am not on a cheaper and more convenient phone with regular Android, so if GrapheneOS refuses to support an alternative to Google Play Services, I'm not too happy about it. If there are real problems with microG then I'm sure the authors would be interested in a better solution too.

That doesn't make any sense at all. GrapheneOS by default has _0_ Google connections unlike LineageOS, /E/ or any other AOSP fork. MicroG is not an alternative to not using play services at all = actually avoiding Google, but a open source reimplementation that still has all the privacy and security issues of regular play services. GrapheneOS sandboxes Google play services only have the privacy issues since just like with MicroG you still connect to Google = not actually avoiding Google.

The issue with no notification without play services can be easily fixed by not using privacy hostile apps which only work with them.

[bornfreddy]

You are missing the point. MicroG allows me to disable it when I want to, and push notifications still work when I (rarely) need to enable it.

It's not about security, it is about privacy. While MicroG in theory could bypass NetGuard, I very much doubt that anyone would bother. My privacy is not that precious.

But as I said, neither solution is great. How about sandboxing MicroG too?

[akimbostrawman]

There is no privacy advantage by using MicroG compared to Google play services. You still connect to there service all the same giving privileged access to your device. There is a security AND privacy advantage by using sandboxed google play because they limit the kind of system access it has compared to MicroG/play services.

Again the only advantage of MicroG compared to play services is that it's open source, you still have all the same privacy and security issues.

Its already a lot of work to support the official play services and make them work in a sandbox, supporting another layer in between is more headache than its worth it or they have time/money for. Not to mention that sandboxed play services work with much more feature than MicroG such as android auto.

[bornfreddy]

> There is no privacy advantage by using MicroG compared to Google play services. You still connect to there service all the same giving privileged access to your device.

...assuming you are connected all the time, or at least that the services are running all the time. In my case they are not. I only enable them every once in a while, when I need to be alerted of something. This might not be how most people use their phones, but I do it because there is no way to preserve any privacy at all if you are running Google services 24/7 (sandboxed or not).

I see Google services as malicious software - not security malicious (Google can't risk that) but privacy malicious. This is why I care more about ability to turn them on / off than about what kind of access they have. Even inside the sandbox, as regular apps, they have way too much info about me.

As I said: I would prefer sandoxed MicroG, but given the available options non-sandboxed MicroG is preferable to sandboxed always-on Google services.