Aurora "Requires GSF" - How often is that true?

StarfirePrime

Hello! I am just getting my feet wet in GOS (thanks for all your work!). I would like to keep as many apps out of the sandboxed Google user profile as possible. I've noticed that Aurora will advertise "Requires GSF" when searching for apps. However, I have found several apps that appear to install and run in the Owner profile. In one case (Microsoft Authenticator), only the app in the sandbox would let me log in with a work or school account - the Owner version would not. So clearly there is a "feature" that requires GSF, but not the overall app. I have installed a few other "Requires GSF" apps in Owner, largely with success.

My questions for those with more experience - How often do you find that apps tagged by Aurora as "Requires GSF" actually run fine in Owner? If the answer is frequently, then do you often find internal features missing in those cases?

Thanks!

Hulk

StarfirePrime

Aurora Store is wrong. Those apps include the Play services libraries which doesn't mean they require Play services. It means they include the code for using it.

It's not the only misleading thing about how it labels apps. Don't take those labels too seriously and don't make privacy/security decisions based on the lack of those labels. It doesn't imply than an app is more privacy friendly. It's simply detecting which libraries are used by an app, which just means they include that third party code. It doesn't know anything about when they use it, how they use it or whether they do exactly the same things without using those libraries. Entirely possible to use Google services without including Google libraries, and many of Google's proprietary libraries work without Play services.

Source: r/GrapheneOS

Welteam

The tag is merely something to show if the GSF library is bundled with the app. Whether GMS is required to run the app at all can only be determined on a case by case basis by the user. However, there are very few GMS features which would prevent an app from running at all.