This could be big news. I'm still digging into the latest Play Services release to learn more, but the strings clearly suggest Google is working on an Android equivalent to Apple's "Find My" network.
xda-developers.com/google-find-my
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This is one case where it makes sense to put it into GMS. You can't widely roll out something like this if you just add it to AOSP. By putting it in GMS, it'll become available on hundreds of millions of Android devices if not more.
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Adding features to AOSP can also bring them to devices not receiving major OS updates via APEX modules. They can add features in Quarterly Platform Releases and include them in the mainline releases.
Including it in AOSP or Play services is a choice on whether it will be a proprietary feature or not. It's not about bringing it to more devices. That was the historical excuse, but it doesn't work anymore. It's not valid anymore. In particular, U2F/FIDO2 should be in AOSP...
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We plan on making our own FIDO2 implementation which will be open source. They make strange decisions about these things sometimes, like how we had to get a new open source fastboot.js implementation and web installer built since they chose to keep their one proprietary.
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They're perfectly capable of shipping a feature both ways without code duplication.