Re: What can't you do on Android WITHOUT a Google Account set up in the OS?

On 02/01/2025 10:46, R.Wieser wrote:

Jeff,
 

However, Android is said to have 12 million lines of code. Is it really
known to anyone outside Google what all of them do?

 Which is exactly why a sane person would not want to go and try to
de-google-ify it, and starting with a clean version would be a better idea.
Yes, I applied logic there.
 Also, the parent spoke of "android" after which I tried to make him aware
that Googles android is something different than android.   Yet, you speak
of "android" as if googles version of it is the base one.   Do you have any
support for that ?

Well, Google didn't invent Android, but if you look at <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#History> you'll see that Android Inc started in 2000 and was going in the wrong direction for 4 years (being developed as  an OS for digital cameras). They changed for a year to try to develop it as a mobile OS, but had almost gone bust at one time. Google bought them out in 2005. The rest is history.
(There is a slightly different account for the earliest years at <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history#Overview>, but it is not significantly different).
Effectively, unless you're going to suggest that the 20-years old pre-Google Android is what Graphene and others developed their OS from, it can /only/ have come from stripping down Google's Android.

And by the way, I do not even think that the people inside Google know what
all of it does. :-)

I don't disagree, but that's what happens over a long development time. However, nobody else is better placed than those inside Google to know what Android does. And that's what  concerns me - who knows what "innocent" code they've included that nobody else knows about? Have Graphene and others /really/ looked through all the code and know what it does?
On an unrelated point, I was surprised to see that GrapheneOS uses automatic updates only. There's no choice - their OS is updated whether you want it or not. That's not what I would have expected.
--
Jeff