GeapheneOS (Pixel only) has sandboxed play services by default, with controls over location data, etc. Not sure if that's what you're after but I thought I'd mention it.
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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Thanks but I'm shooting for as little contact with Google as possible
Ironically, GrapheneOS is pretty much that (minus the hardware) unless you want to get an iPhone or Windows phone. You'll have to have Play Services to play the games you want to play; may as well use the only sandboxed version afaik. The reason the Pixel line was chosen is because it's essentially what iPhone is for Apple... There will be no vendor add-ons or modifications, just stock android which can be modified into things like GrapheneOS. But it's more for security and privacy than it sounds like you need. Just keep in mind whatever you choose, cracked apps have a much higher chance of containing malware unless you learn to crack them yourself, but then you'd have no time to game.
https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-play-services
Since the Play services apps are simply regular apps on GrapheneOS, you install them within a specific user or work profile and they're only available within that profile. Only apps within the same profile can use it and they need to explicitly choose to use it. It works the same way as any other app and has no special capabilities. As with any other app, it can't access data of other apps and requires explicit user consent to gain access to profile data or the standard permissions. Apps within the same profile can communicate with mutual consent and it's no different for sandboxed Play services.
ETA: It looks like there is a modified open source Play Services client called MicroG, which is basically a rewrite of Play Services that allows things to work, but things requiring payments or payments via NFC etc may not work.
I think you just want to play games without play services, not actually learn apk reverse engineering (which is a very complex skill), so MicroG is probably what you want. https://microg.org/
What data would be sent off having Google Play services installed? I get that you can disable certain permissions and can also use profiles.
Ideally I wouldn't want to use profiles. I could use something like Shelter on a rooted device but that kind of slows down multitasking
Nothing, if you want. You can disable network permissions on play services. ~~Google~~ DDG first to make sure that won't break the game. Depends on what the game uses play services for... if it's some local functionality it will be fine, if it's remote functionality then it will break.
Good point. I had forgotten about disabling network access. I think a majority of the games I paid for work off the idea that if you connect a few times or have a certain amount of plays times you can then play offline. Well the ones that check that is.
Maybe I'll give this a go. Thanks for the advice
Windows phone? How is that still relevant?
Lucky Patcher is probably the best and the easiest thing you can use on android. You can use it without root, but not everything will work
Also, check 4pda.to, pretty informative place about pirated stuff
I've tried lucky patcher with a few games with minimal luck. I haven't tried it with Stardew Valley though so maybe there's a chance
If you're willing to learn, look up apktool and ghidra, as well as the Dalvik bytecode reference. Some apps can be relatively simple to crack using one-liner Dalvik modifications. Others may require analysis and patching of the binary libraries. Some Unity games include debug symbols, which can be inspected using Il2CppInspector which makes the binary code easier to understand and easier to find the proper point for a crack. Start by extracting apks, and try something simple like removing the INTERNET permission from the AndroidManifest, to see if the app still works if you rebuild the apk. That improves privacy. After that, try removing more permissions or making Dalvik patches or even binary patches. A great game to start with is Terraria, as it can be cracked purely by modifying Dalvik bytecode. I'm not in a position to help further but felt I wanted to share this for educational purposes. Learning these internals is fun. You can even learn to degoogle your current Android ROM by applying a signature spoofing patch and include microG instead as a replacement alternative to google apis. Hope this helps. 🙂
I love me some smali coding 🤪
Aurora store doesn't need play services and the game shouldn't either. Worth trying anyway. That said I never tried to download a paid game.
Some paid games use drm which needs gplay services to function.
you can't download paid content using Aurora Store. it uses sockpuppet Google accounts to download from the Play Store's servers (which is why half the time the accounts are rate limited and don't work anyway)
You can use a valid account if you want.
Why would you assume that a game would not require Play Services? I have experienced that issue many times, including with Stardew Valley.
I had a few legacy apps on the paid store, and everything works on my /e/os without any Google, I'm not sure what does it, but I have Aurora and microG
MicroG is what probably is making it work for you. However not everyone uses microG.