On my Pixel 2, the only apps I can't disable are Settings, Phone, Messages, SIM toolkit, Pixel Launcher and Play Services. I can disable (not uninstall) rest of the Google apps that were pre-installed.
The Pixel is .7% of the smartphone market and is the Google device, so by default you're already in their ecosystem and you don't need all the spyware as apps.
The vast majority of the Android market, in the US at least I can assure you, has google or carrier based spyware that you can't delete or disable.
Unlike "Settings", the name is not "Play Services", but "Google Play Services". It makes sense that you shouldn't be able to disable literally everything that was built-in such as Settings (how else are you supposed to undo what you just did...) but the problem is that you can't disable preloaded Google apps (which includes Google Play Services).
Oh you may have misunderstood my comment. On my phone at least, there is an app named "Play Services" which I assume provides things like location services and other background Google platform APIs. You can disable other pre-loaded Google apps individually (Google Search/Assistant, GMail, etc).
FWIW, I too hate that there isn't a replacement for those Play Services. I'm so frustrated - Pixel launcher will not show temperature in Celsius unless I give it "Web and App Activity" permission.
And English Australia / English UK won't display Celsius by default without web permissions? (Granted, that would also mess with the display of calendar dates.)
I think I understand what's happening here. If I click the temperaure on launcher, it opens the Google Search app querying for "weather" - here it is in celsius.
Temperature units preference is saved in Google Search app. Pixel launcher, even though it shows the news cards from Search app, cannot show temperature in the units of my choice unless I give it the "Web and App activity" permission. Just Google things.
Play services makes sure that things like fine location services work on your phone. It can't be uninstalled or disabled because it's tied much deeper to the os than a normal app, and nothing else offers the same functionality that you can normally install. (There's competitors like microg but you can't install them without having an unlocked bootloader)
> Play services makes sure that things like fine location services work on your phone. It can't be uninstalled or disabled because it's tied much deeper to the os than a normal app, and nothing else offers the same functionality that you can normally install. (There's competitors like microg but you can't install them without having an unlocked bootloader)
Isn't that literally the point? When the complaint is that Google is tying itself to the OS and leaving few viable alternative options, the fact that Google is tying itself to the OS and leaving fewer alternative options is more like an admission rather than a defense...
It goes deeper than that. Many (most?) Android apps depend on Play Services. If there were an option to remove it, it would basically be a "break most of my phone" option.
To make this viable, at a minimum, it should be possible to search for apps that don't depend on Play Services, so you could remove most of your apps and replace them with alternatives.
But I expect most users wouldn't do this, and so there is little incentive for most apps to stop depending on Play Services. The only real incentive to do it is to be able to publish the app on Amazon.
Oh the good old IE argument "but it is technically integrated to the OS and providing all kind of essential services, so we are not abusing our monopoly"
While it is not (can be removed/replaced, the limitations preventing to do that are completely artificial and this is probably playing a good role in what has been judged), and even if it was, things should have been bundled differently to begin with (if they can't, that can be considered a conscious decision potentially motivated by a desire to abuse a monopoly, so in all cases that should be redesigned)
So it's mostly same cause/same effects from an high level overview -- and I'm not surprised. Maybe the way to become compliant (after their pointless whining phase has passed) will even be similar? I'm not buying the business model argument. Google browser, play store and so over are now extremely well established and won't be abandoned by any kind of mass exodus any time soon. In ten years, they can be challenged, but that's the fucking POINT: practical competition should be allowed.
It's astonishing that everybody and their dog was scandalized by MS behavior in the time (and some even are today, despite present MS being quite different from the old one), while Google has somehow managed to be considered friendly regardless of the doing exactly the same shit, if not worse, while simultaneously even pretending that they are not evil. Well maybe evil is a strong word, and I can concede that they did not pretend they are not hypocrites :p
Playing devil's advocate here. I feel like Play Services is necessary evil. This is the only thing that's keeping the ecosystem from fragmenting further. Look at the OEMs update cycle. If not for Play Services which are updated independently from Android OS itself, app compatability would be a nightmare. There is nothing to replace it with. Nokia tried and failed.
Other thing is, if every OEM starts writing their own API for these services, app developers will have to write apps for each OEM because they for sure will not work with each other. We will go back to the days of Symbian where apps will come with a huge list of phones it is known to work with.
