F-Droid isn't "non-standard firmware", it's just an app store like the Play Store is and can in fact exist alongside the Play Store just fine. You don't need to

F-Droid isn't "non-standard firmware", it's just an app store like the Play Store is and can in fact exist alongside the Play Store just fine. You don't need to do any fancy trickery to get it working (download APK from their site, install and that's it) and rather notably, due to (good!) changes by Google to comply with EU law, is basically an indistinguishable installation experience from the Play Store when it comes to updates. As for faking empty/arbitrary data: this is a thing in Android, and has been a thing for several versions now. The unfortunate problem is that for reasons that I'm sure aren't tied to the big G's economic interests, the UI around "granted but not really" is complete dogwater (it's basically only functional for the gallery permission these days). You can use something like appops[0] to forcibly override these permissions options, but it really should be made more user friendly. I think the main problem with the closed garden is that it expects Apple to be a fair and unbiased steward of their ecosystem, when it's been proven over and over again that they absolutely aren't. They allowed the app store to be flooded with ad-riddled junk, allow for paid search results that make it harder for people to install government apps[1], press smaller app devs into adding more payment schemes and even on the most basic level demand a continuous resource drain with their licensing schemes that ensures that "just make a good app and sell it once" is eventually an unsustainable business model. And that's just the stuff that ends up hurting the customer; the dev experience from what I've been told is even more miserable. This isn't to defend Android as being superior (the Play Store also has many of these issues), but at least with Android I can substitute the Play Store for F-Droid when it comes to non-government and non-banking apps. F-Droid at least ensures that I don't wake up one morning to realize that I have to plan a full week of support for relatives because an app decided to start milking it's userbase for money and ruin the experience; when Simple Mobile Tools went to shit, I was able to just spread that stuff out over a couple weeks at my own pace since F-Droid never shipped that version. (And it helped the fork get off the ground too.) [0]: https://appops.rikka.app https://appops.rikka.app [1]: Probably one of the most frequent requests I got when I did tech stuff for the elderly was just "help me set up the government app to see [some service they were using]"; invariably the App Store would push some healthcare insurance nonsense or other vaguely related thing as the first result, which confused the hell out of them. It's unacceptable and I don't get where the "my low-tech relatives like it" idea comes from.