this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Yes, but those minor traces are easy enough to remove, especially if you don't care about being "ceritified" by Google (i.e. are not planning to run the Google services).
Exactly.
https://source.android.com/docs/setup/about/faqs
Google services are entirely missing from Android open source. The Google Play package is what contains the entirety of Google's services.
Not sure if anyone remembers but back when cyanogenMod was the go-to, early versions had Google services included. Google sent a cease and desist notice and said it was a license violation. You cannot distribute it as part of the OS by default. The next release of cyanogenMod had it removed. Users had to flash the package if they wanted it.
Right but the topic was about google's data harvesting and what I meant was that you can't just grab any AOSP distribution if you want to minimize that, you need to pick one that replaces the parts that send data to google. LineageOS for example still phones google for quite a number of services.
As far as "easy to remove" goes, I think that's kind of debatable if you want to do it in a way that's sustainable long term considering the effort that goes into e.g. GrapheneOS or DivestOS.
Edit: here is a list of the kind of stuff you need to watch out for if you want to minimize the data sent to google
https://divestos.org/pages/network_connections
I was answering under the assumption/the context of of "Amazon wants to release an Android-based OS that doesn't contact any of Googles services".
So, when I said "easy enough to remove" that was relative to releasing any commercial OS based on AOSP, as in: this will be one of the smallest tasks involved in this whole venture.
They will need an (at least semi-automated) way to keep up with changes from upstream and still apply their own code-changes on top of that anyway and once that is set up, a small set of 10-ish 3-line patches is not a lot of effort. For an individual getting started and trying to keep that all up to do date individually it's a bit more of an effort, granted.
The list you linked is very interesting, but I suspect that much of that isn't in AOSP, my suspicion is that at most the things up to and excluding the Updater even exist in AOSP.
Yes but people are just sideloading GAPPS and escaping their ecosystem. Might even run custom launchers so you can't experience their ads.