Hello! I just received my FLX1 yesterday and am so excited and I'm hoping you can help unstick me with certain Google apps for Android (I'll stick with Gmail as the exemplar). I've updated to the latest version of Furios.
When I open Gmail I get a modal saying "Gmail won't run without Google Play services, which are not supported by your device". When I dismiss the modal there's an option to add an email address which takes me to the same flow as adding an account via Micro G which I've already done. If I try to proceed with adding my email address it will alert me that the account already exists on the device. I thought I might just try to re-initialize waydroid with GAPPS but I see that it's been customized to remove that init option.
Thanks for making this awesome phone. I'm sure things will continue to get even better over time.
fakeshell 19/02/2025 9:34 am
@tommy if an app explicitly depends on a google play service that microg doesn't implement there ain't a whole lot we can do (we cannot legally redistribute gapps images either), and even if that init gapps option were to work, waydroid upstream has no support for android 13 so you would just get an error message that there is no available image for gapps and even if it did, it would just segfault after first launch since our version is not really waydroid, its just called waydroid because thats what we started with last year 😉
tommy Topic starter
19/02/2025 11:15 am
Ah, gotcha. Thanks for the info. I'll see how far I can get with waydroid on my computer understanding that waydroid and waydroid aren't the same thing and that my computer has significantly different hardware and software than the phone. Hopefully I can still learn a little more about things that way and if anything useful comes up I'll share what I learn here. Maybe I can just try an old Gmail apk first...
tommy Topic starter
19/02/2025 4:39 pm
Looks like Google may have made a change that broke things: https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/issues/2680.
I installed a version of Gmail from 2023 and it was able to sign in, see my inbox, and send an email even though the app froze and I had to kill it. That's not the experience I want so I installed Thunderbird and my early impressions are better than I expected. I'd never tried Thunderbird for mobile before and it seems more modern than the (last time) I tried the desktop version. Ultimately I'd prefer to reduce my dependence on Google anyway so hopefully I continue to like it.
I'll just use a browser for Calendar and Drive for now. I installed Voice as a PWA and I'm guessing that I'm going to have to get used to life without Android Auto.
glad to hear that thunderbird is working for you. I was about to recommend k9 mail which also can sync gmail. in general I tend to find that there are apps that replicate what the google apps do and can integrate with google services. I have been living with a degoogled phone for a while so I am used to it at this point. It will be interesting to see what your thoughts are on the platform.
