Trying to find apps which don't work without Google services while testing a bit more before flashing on my Pixel 3a to finally have a de-googled daily driver.
Even on Graphene my banking apps and WhatsApp are working, no notifications though.
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There are the obvious incapacitated ones named or owned By Google (Maps, Waze etc.)
The first surprising one to complain is (backed up to Google Drive).
There is some tradeoff with the camera although Open Camera is quite configurable.
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Curious where did you have the most inconvenience running and which are solved by ?
So far the tradeoffs I can gather:
* notifications
* camera
* navigation (with traffic info)
* some apps which might not work even with microG
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Push notifications work fine on GrapheneOS as long as apps don't have a hard dependency on FCM, and they won't magically work on CalyxOS without enabling FCM to send push notifications through Google's FCM service, including for apps which don't depend on it.
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Firebase (Google) Cloud Messaging. It's a push notification service provided by Google with a client implemented as part of Play services. It's partially implemented by microG and still has to use Google's servers since that's where app servers send their push notifications.
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Apps can do the same thing themselves: keep open a connection to their server and push the notifications through it, with occasional checks (throttled based on network reliability / type) to make sure the connection hasn't died.
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Apps just need a foreground service + battery optimization exception. There's nothing inherently less efficient about an implementation not tied to Google. It's efficient to share a single high quality implementation rather than assorted lackluster ones. Apps can share a library.
This often fits well into existing protocols. For example, IMAP has IMAP IDLE to provide push notifications via IMAP. An email app can use that to implement push notifications with the same connection they need to fetch the emails after receiving notice that there are new ones.
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As one example, email.faircode.eu supports that, but do various other email apps. Many apps support push notifications without Play. Definitely not all of the major apps that many western users expect to work, sure. Many of those require Play services to work at all.
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