A common criticism of free-software projects built for Android is that they all too often rely not just on the frameworks and libraries that are part of the official Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but on the proprietary APIs implemented in various add-ons from Google – such as the Google Maps API or the Google Cloud Messaging message-broker service. Working around these Google-supplied components is not trivial, but there is at least one effort underway to provide a drop-in free-software replacement: microG.
We talked about microG over two years ago.
I have microG on my older android phone (HTC Desire S), and it very usable. It even appears to reduce power consumption a little bit. It is amazing though, how many applications are only available via Google Play.
Works ok for what is worth (integrates location services, push client and other). Although, while you replace these maybe it’s better to get rid of apps that need these services in the first place.
Like OsmAnd works great offline(!) for maps, with navigation and such.
Conversations holds the encrypted messages end rather well (see the other discussion though: http://www.osnews.com/comments/29282 ). For instance it works great without push services and the battery is not affected. Now compare this with Hangouts on Google Services with >30% battery eaten in the same time frame and things get clearer.
/jk When Doze was presented everyone was disappointed that you could not optimize Google Services (they’re whitelisted and you can’t change that).
Edited 2016-07-11 22:26 UTC