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Google Play Services

We care about privacy very seriously. Data is the new gold. Do you really want to share your business data and meta data with third parties? As a matter of fact, standard Android devices have been built to share and monetize every data…without your consent.

At Famoco we think differently and want to protect every of our customer's business. Our redesigned Android OS is: 100% private, secure and business oriented. That’s why we've removed the Google Play Services in the firmwares shipped with our devices. We are fully aware that not providing Google Play Services will prevent some applications from running on our devices.

No worries, there are many alternatives on the market available. Here is below the list. Should you have any questions, or need help during integration, our support team is here to help. Don’t hesitate to contact us.

Location

Google provides two methods to retrieve location on an Android device :

  • Platform location API : relies directly on the Android system, this API is provided by the standard Android SDK.
  • Google Location Services API : relies on Google Play Services.

Only the Platform Location API method is available on Famoco Operating Systems, the Google Location Services API is NOT supported on Famoco devices. You can get more information about how to retrieve location using the Platform Location API here and on the official Google Developer Site here

Map

Another common feature part of the Google Play Services is the possibility to display a Google Map into an application. one of the alternatives to Google Map is OpenStreetMap for Android. OpenStreetMap for Android is fully supported on Famoco devices and we wrote a detailed guide here. You will find all the necessary information to integrate OpenStreetMap in your Android project on the official project page here

Push Notifications

The Push Notification solution proposed by Google is called Firebase Cloud Messaging (previously known as Google Cloud Messaging). Firebase Cloud Messaging requires Google Play Services run on Android devices, therefore it can not be used on Famoco devices. There are alternative solutions with companies that provided reliable and equivalent services. One of the recommended solutions tested by Famoco is Pushy.me and we wrote a detailed guide to integrate Pushy.me SDK into an Android project. Other solutions exist and you can find some of them mentioned on this page

Barcode Scanner through device camera

The Google Play Services API offers an API called "Mobile Vision" that makes it possible to read barcodes. An alternative to read barcodes and QRCodes is to use the open source library ZXing for Android. We wrote a tutorial page available here and more documentation is available on the official web site