Something went wrong, please make sure google play is enabled on your device.

[alyfrillnya]

What happened?

I am on a non-rooted degoogled android rom, with microg and google play services, but not the google play app itself (com.android.vending) installed. i was assuming it would work on my device, open-source and all that, but that error in the title shows every time. is there a way you could disable or fix this?

[Universal82]

I went digging in the source and it looks like google services are needed for something called Firebase. From very minimal research, I can guess they probably use it for storing user-generated content, like uploaded files and/or authentication. So it'll probably stick around as a dependency as long as their dev team is the size that it is. I am not a professional developer, and even less so on android, so take this with a grain of salt.

[alyfrillnya]

can't they just change it to do user generated things and authentication in the way the website does? i really dont want to install google play

[Frebbers]

Firebase is used for message notifications as well as sending and receiving messages because Google Firebase is used to store accounts. I personally really disagree with this decision, and hope they will pivot to something truly open source like supabase.