Ship microG GmsCore

[rafifos]

"microG GmsCore is a FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) framework to allow applications designed for Google Play Services to run on systems, where Play Services is not available."

I guess that is a good alternative to Google Play Services on Anbox, you should take a look

microG

[M1cha]

Another option would be a port of TWRP so we can just install opengapps.

[morphis]

I didn't knew about microG before. Quite interesting project.

However, for Anbox as a project the best option is to not ship any store by default for now. The project is still in its early phase and shipping a store will also have impact on the legal side of things. That said we will try to make it easy for users to install additional software like Fdroid or microG. Fdroid only requires installation of an APK and microG looks similar. You can install both already today with adb and there is a plan to make this easier by implementing support for apk installation directly into the anbox command line utility.

[kennethso168]

While I understand the contributors' intention of not including any store, I would like to clarify a bit.
"Google Play Services" <> "Google Play”. Google Play Services (and microG) is NOT a store. As defined by Wikipedia, "Google Play Services is a proprietary background service and API package for Android devices." It includes APIs such as the Maps and Locations API. It just happens that Google Play depends on the services and so the confusion arises. A lot of apps that depend on the services may break without the services installed. And that's a reason why microG exists to provide an FOSS replacement to the services.
I think microG might need something more than installing an apk from adb (such as signature spoofing), but I'm not sure as I haven't tried it. Anyway, such integration would be great, not for easy installation of apps, but better compatibility of apps.

[M1cha]

@morphis why don't you/we just make it easy to install gapps? That's exactly how custom ROM's like lineageOS do it and you won't have any legal issues.

[Silent-Hunter]

Does Google care if end users install gapps without a license? I wouldn't imagine there would be any issues with providing instructions to get them from Google.

[rugk]

No Google does not care. Every Custom ROM does it. Just go to http://opengapps.org/, grap your ZIP and flash it. That's the way it could also be used in Anbox.

[morphis]

@kennethso168 Don't get me wrong. I am not against anyone using microg or other things like fdroid but we as the Anbox project don't want to dictate our users what they should use. We want to ship clean AOSP with necessary enhancements to make the installation of things like microg or fdroid easy on the users choice once Anbox is installed on a system. That's it.

[rafifos]

@rugk Custom ROM devs doesn't ship GApps due to legal issues, YOU are choosing to make this changes, no one is responsible for what YOU does. But.. if a ROM ship GApps, they're responsible for it.

[rafifos]

and @morphis while it's true that microG only need a few apk installations, it's true that it need a system patch too, to enable signature spoofing..

but this is a security issue, am i right?

[rugk]

@h4ndshake Yes, that's what I said. I just described the process how you can do it… 😃

Basically: End user need no license. You just do it.