play-services-plugins VS GmsCoreHuawei

Android is basically open source at the bare minimum. To use Android in a meaningful way, you need Google Play Services, which are proprietary and have root privileges on most Android phones (allowing Google to collect a lot of private data easily). The only ROMs I know of which utilise Sandboxed Google Play Services are GrapheneOS and ProtonAOSP. microG exists on CalyxOS and /e/ OS, but it will never be as compatible as Google Play Services.

One problem with relying on emulation is that Google has moved a lot of functionality from the open source Android layer to Google Play Services, and they obviously wont publish that on someone else's platform.

https://developers.google.com/android/guides/overview

The main privacy concern with most Android devices is that they usually include Google Play Services.

Here's an overview: https://developers.google.com/android/guides/overview

Yeah, frustrating I know. I actually made a PR 5 months ago (based on another) to introduce the ability to add libraries if they don’t have it included in their POM. Our use case was that we used a web view with local JS files that we needed to attribute to.

There are many online guides to install an fix version of play service and play store. The phone won't slow down at all. But after some time of use I always get the notification "the device is not play protect certified" every few seconds which is super annoying. I am sticking with microG for now. It works fine with most of the apps requiring GSM even google maps, except YouTube and play store. Vanced and Aurora are still good alternatives.