You're conflating GCM and the wider Google Play Services that is installed on most Android devices. As someone who actually uses AOSP without Google, it weakens your argument when you conflate the two.
It seems like you don't want to install Google Play Services on your device. My sense is that this isn't because you find the communication over GCM to be inherently offensive (it's just a tickle, after all), but because you don't want to run proprietary software.
There's a very small number of people who find this to be very important, and my experience has been that the strategy is to loudly complain whenever anything depends on play services. Just tactically speaking, I don't think this is going to work in the end, in the same sense that simply refusing to have a mobile phone won't work anymore -- slowly, the circumstances around this technology will make it impossible to refuse.
What I don't understand is why nobody just writes an API-compatible open source implementation of play services. Even if it only supported GCM and nothing else, that'd unlock an enormous swath of apps, and would only require writing a basic implementation of the GCM network protocol.
I'd love to know more if I'm misunderstanding the challenges around doing that. Right now it's part of the reason that I don't pay much attention to that crowd -- everyone seems very willing to complain, but nobody seems willing to do what seems like pretty straightforward work to solve their own problem.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I assume it has to do with message notifications. So, by using GCM, Signal would be leaking some metadata about when and who, etc. I assume. But wouldn't someone be able to get that same information from your ISP (with a little more work)?
You're losing the benefits of longer battery life for basically nothing.
Security isn't absolute. I don't know why this blogger has the attitude that there is such a thing.
agree on the issue but I don't think that Play Services is a great exemple.
It has always been closed source and can be replaced in any AOSP build. Google has no obligation to provide open sources apps and services on top of AOSP.
The point regarding Play Services is valid, and if the parent comment had focused on that I would not have objected. But that doesn't mean AOSP is a "very small part" of Android or that it isn't open source.
The flip-side of your experience is that it highlights the existence of a large number of Android devices based on AOSP that don't run Google apps, particularly in the PRC. Aside from the Chinese market, you have a major company like Amazon selling millions of devices with their own AOSP fork on them. On an individual level, I can install Lineage OS on my unlocked devices and use apps from F-Droid as well as many others.
Play Services does have a significant foothold in many users' experiences, which bears discussion, but it doesn't invalidate AOSP. It is Android's open source nature that allows for forks and for apps to be shared across the Android ecosystem much more readily than programs developed for an actual proprietary operating system such as Windows.
I think you're mixing up AOSP and Google Apps / Play Services.
AOSP is available under a standard open source license, and can be used by anyone under those terms. It's the use of Play Services and Google's Apps that requires specific permission and has relatively onerous terms. CyanogenMod can use Play Services, but it doesn't have to, and seems to be moving away from it entirely.
'google play services' is software package (app) that sits between the os (android) and the (other) apps. it provides a lot of middleware like maps and push-notifications. it has grown in power to the point that an android phone without them is pretty much pointless, hence micro-g tries to substitute.
As someone who's spent just as much time (if not more) developing for embedded Android devices without Google Play Services as developing for "traditional" ones, you're making a meaningless distinction.
It's half the functionality that makes an Android device work for an unsophisticated user. To the point that people have to write shims just to get basic apps to run without it.
And the amount of functionality Google has moved into GPS has only grown over the years mind you, from things like Doze and its interaction with GPS, to installation processes that hook into it for verification...
If Android didn't have Google Play Services, it wouldn't be anything more than what Linux on smartphones is... a toy for geeks, nothing competitive with offerings like the iPhone.
Google has abandoned most AOSP apps. It has moved large parts of the API into Play Services. Android is not open, what is open is merely an incompatible fragment of an OS.
Google is constantly pushing their proprietary APIs so a lot apps in practice only work with play services, if you even can get hold of them without the Play store app. they also abandon more and more of the AOSP builtin Apps, new features and are added mostly only to the proprietary counterparts. So a lot of things people might attribute to Android are in fact part of the Google Apps. The direction is clear and AOSP is entirely controlled by google, they could simply decide to not open the next Version or parts of it.
>fused location system ... which can't exist without Googles involvement
That's kind of a cop-out though. It certainly could exist without Google's involvement if the location provider were a pluggable module within AOSP. microG does this - my phone supports the fused location API using Mozilla's location database instead of Google's. (There are other modules too, like a local database of cell towers if you're willing to dedicate some storage to it.)
Push notifications and Google login sure, but some of what's in the Play Services APIs should really be in AOSP, IMO.
EDIT: For that matter, you could even have the push provider available as a module too, even though Google's push service is the only one currently available.
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