play-services-plugins VS community-ports

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.

> what is the remaining work I would need to have done in order to get it working under

A good chunk of the Linux community on phones didn't want to have to rely on binary drivers for non-technical reasons, and that's one of the reasons why it isn't exactly well taken care of today.

For Ubuntu Touch specifically:

https://docs.ubports.com/en/latest/porting/introduction/Intr... for Ubuntu Touch.

https://github.com/ubports/porting-notes/wiki/Generic-System...

An upgraded Halium (https://github.com/Halium) image on a can work unmodified across the whole ecosystem of Android devices.

However, the latest currently developed experimental Halium works on an Android 11 base at most, so that devices launched with Android 12 might be using drivers too new for it at this point in time.

(https://gitlab.com/ubports/community-ports/jenkins-ci/generi...)

This can be fixed with an engineering effort to do so to make it work on devices launched with Android 12. The Linux on phones community is very small and that causes problems in this case. Together with the unified kernel image (GKIs) on Android 12, a full experience can be made possible.

I wonder how big the audience would be for such a project though. :)

Halium has been already ported and is supported by UBports: https://gitlab.com/ubports/community-ports/android9/xiaomi-redmi-note-7-pro/xiaomi-violet/-/blob/master/README.md

You can see progress for yourself if you like: https://gitlab.com/ubports/community-ports/pinephone