What's Google doing in your phone for 17hrs straight???

huginn , 32 minutes ago

Here is a short list of things that Play Services do:

1. Scan for active malware
2. Nearby Share
3. App attestation (Required for banking apps)
4. Encrypted backup of your data
5. Autofill
6. All push notifications
7. Find my device
8. Basic telemetry (talked about elsewhere in this thread but it’s telling Google who you are and where you are)

Even if you remove all telemetry you’d need to have the services running 24/7 in the background maintaining a socket connection to push notification services.

ewigkaiwelo , 39 minutes ago

Can anyone share your experience with installing LineageOS on a Xiaomi device? I was thinking doing this as the only way of removing google from the smartphone but the build for my device is community (not stable)

kyub , 51 minutes ago

If you use Google’s Play Services and/or other Google proprietary apps and services (they are standard on all commercial Android phones), then your battery will be drained slightly more due to it having spyware (euphemism: “telemetry”) integrated. The Google Play services app, for example, does transmit at the minimum this data roughly every 20 minutes to Google:

<span style="color:#323232;">Phone #
</span><span style="color:#323232;">SIM Card #
</span><span style="color:#323232;">IMEI (world-wide unique device ID)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">S/N of your device
</span><span style="color:#323232;">WIFI MAC address
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Android ID
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Mail Address of your  logged in Google account
</span><span style="color:#323232;">IP address
</span>

And that is just if you have disabled ALL telemetry in ALL of the options, even the most hidden ones. So this is the minimum amount they are always gathering from every Android user, no matter what you selected. To make matters worse, the Google Play services is typically installed as a “system critical app” which means you as the owner of the phone can’t even uninstall it or reduce some of its permissions.

(If you have an iPhone instead, and think you’re safe from this, no you aren’t. Apple also collects a minimum amount of telemetry data which you cannot ever completely disable, it just does it slightly less frequently (IIRC, it was like every hour or so, compared to Google’s every 20min at the minimum).

And then there’s also the advertisement ID, a world-wide unique identifier set in all commercial Androids as well as iOS, for apps to track you. You can only reset it to a new random ID but never disable it fully.

To stop all of this bullsh!t, and also to stop the additional battery/resource drain caused by this, I recommend getting a Pixel phone and replacing the proprietary stock Android OS with GrapheneOS and then not installing any Google apps/services on top of it. You can get apps via F-Droid, Obtainium, Aurora store (those are the convenient methods). You can use ntfy as an alternative to the Google firebase messaging (notification) service that you won’t have access to when not having Google Play services running.

Dave , 3 hours ago

Is Google Play Services not the app that maintains a constant connection to the server for the purposes of receiving notifications for all apps? As well as other things apps on your phone might be using like location services.

This is one app I’d expect to run 24/7, but happy to be corrected on this.

osaerisxero , 3 hours ago

This is basically correct, though it also does other stuff.

EDIT: Location services is in its own process tho

slimarev92 , 3 hours ago

That’s not Google, these are the APIs that power the whole OS. Most of the apps on your phone use them.

Rikj000 , 3 hours ago

Spying on you :P

That’s why I replaced it with MicroG:
microg.org

frobeniusnorm , 3 hours ago

just vibing (doing stasi stuff)

B312 , 3 hours ago

Where funny

SzethFriendOfNimi , 4 hours ago

Downloading a lot of stuff in the background over slow networks? Or facilitating some kind of cloud backup/save data?