play-services-plugins VS ubuntu-touch

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.

Ubuntu Touch, for example, does not support Full Disk Encryption, when Android has moved on from Full Disk Encryption to File-Based Encryption. Android utilises SELinux in enforcing mode for Mandatory Access Control even for root/superuser processes. Sandboxing with Flatpak cannot compare to the OS-level app sandboxing done on Android and iOS. Permission management on Flatpak is good, but still not as advanced as Android or iOS. On phones, (real) Linux is quite easily outclassed in security when compared to Android.

For those seeking a change https://ubports.com/

It still uses many of the Android components via Halium on traditional Android devices which end up unpatched and for devices not with a mainline kernel use outdated vendor kernels. https://github.com/ubports/ubuntu-touch/issues/1566

I'd suggest taking a look at contributing to existing efforts like UBPorts

Ubuntu Touch doesn't even have encryption and ships kernels with many known security issues: https://github.com/ubports/ubuntu-touch/issues/178

Fyi, the project isn't dead, it is just not developed by Canonical anymore: https://ubports.com/

There is already Ubport https://ubports.com/ project that is supporting Ubuntu for smartphones and guides you to compile debian with all the phone functionalities. Some parts of modem abstraction layer on the Linux (below radio Interface layer) will still be not openesource and i would say it won't be easy to get this source.