Hello,
Long timer lurker and finally decided to participate
I was looking into Pixels and privacy (along with this review What do we think of the new Pixels? ).
I noticed that there are a lot of discussions about the “end of custom ROMs” lately because of the new Play Integrity.
Which made me ask myself if it is a good idea to spend time and invest in installing an alternate OS on a newly acquired Pixel only to be forced to go back to stock in few months.
Maybe I am missing something, but I would love to hear the community thoughts on the matter.
Thank you!
Based on my understanding this would simply make it very difficult to run google play services (or anything using them) on a custom ROM.
This would make it incredibly inconvenient to run one. Since users would pretty much be limited to something like F-Droid for all of their apps.
But it won’t “end” custom ROM’s.
There are people using them. Despite no support or limited support for Google Play Services in many cases.
But it does change the landscape and not in a good way.
Thank you. But for an average user (like me) who still uses main stream Apps related to his bank, local transport etc… Wouldn´t that be a big “no go” ?
I recently had to do a factory reset on a Pixel device running GrapheneOS, and lost access to a couple apps like CashApp and Snapchat. Thankfully, Snapchat could be rolled back to to an old version and I could log in and update the app, but other apps like CashApp are using more advanced detection like PLay Integrity to block people out of their accounts. I would say for me it was only a couple of apps, but more devs might be adopting the tech. For me, I can live without some of these services, but for more average users you would have to do a lot more research into the apps you use to see if you are affected.
Thank you for the feedback.
I am playing around with the stock Pixel now, I installed RethinkDNS and disabled the Apps I do not need. I will try to check the traffic later after sometime in idle to see how many times does Google really phone home after I deactivated the telemitry as well.
Edit: I did not notice any strange traffic ongoing compared to the GrapheneOS phone.
GrapheneOS has Google photo and Camera without internet connection, I used it to take a photo and Google API measurements was used. I did the same on Stock and it is Play API instead, nothing more. I don´t know what more Data Play API would give Google.
A lot of what Graphene does over the Stock OS is contain Google Play Services to the regular App Sandbox that any other user installed app has to do, outside of the security improvements they add to the OS. API calls might change because of how they have to handle Google Play Services, but restricting the amount of access that Google Play Services has to your entire system activity is a net win for privacy and security for my threat model
Google has been tightening its grip on Android ever since Andy Rubin (its creator) was shown the door (for alleged breach of contract) in 2014, with some engineers quitting after him, and others openly questioning Google’s motives at their own flagship developer conference, “Google I/O”. The latest worry about AOSP is just another installment in the shit show that’s been going on for years and trending in the wrong direction.
While I don’t believe Play Integrity would spell the end of custom ROMs, it is indeed making it harder for regular users to rely on them over OEM (stock) OS. This may end up pushing ROM projects into hardware partnerships and become OEM themselves, which might be a good thing in the long term for the ROM developers, but not all ROM projects would be comfortable doing so (especially, the ones focused on “de-Googling”).
All in all, a very predictable move by Google, but if past is any indicator, you can bet your house on them to squeeze us all (in the mod community) even more.
This isn’t the end, but the writing is on the wall.
