Comment by robertlagrant
18 hours ago
> Imagine Microsoft "open-sourcing" Windows (by doing some source drops at regular intervals) but you wouldn't be able to run all the existing Windows applications on it without licensing closed source software and online services from Microsoft.
Or building your own services, presumably?
> Or building your own services, presumably?
In case of Android and Google Play services that is never going to work reliably. Your users will experience breakage on a regular interval and you will make yourself wildly unpopular with app developers (since they will be getting the bug reports of the subtle incompatibilities). Probably to a point where they might just block their app from running on your phone.
All this stuff works on paper but it is going to be a constant up hill battle which you will loose in the end because your users will become fed-up with the constant needling of broken stuff and having to wait for you to fix it. It similar to using Wine on Linux. It works _a lot_ of the time but not all the time.
If you want to experience using reverse engineered Google play services, try an Android phone (or emulator) with microG on it [1].
[1] https://microg.org/
building your own services doesn't help any existing app OSes live and die from 3rd party apps so unless you can convince 10k developers to port their apps to a platform with no users, you're dead in the water
You're talking as though Android owes other phone developers free apps. I don't see why it does.
+1. The entitlement on some of these people are out of the world. There's a perfectly capably operating system being made freely available for everyone, but nope - they want the source code of google maps, google search or whatever.