Google can still see my app activity on GrapheneOS.

Novalissoide

Questionaccount that's the Play Protect feature, it scans installed apps. But it doesn't mean that it pulls your app data and sends it to google.

Questionaccount

Novalissoide

I know that Google can see which apps I have installed through Play Protect, but what I find strange is that they can see when I'm using them.

MineralWater

This has happened because you granted Google to collect all this in your Account privacy settings. For Web and App activity it explains that it collects data from all apps that use play services.

If an app uses play services or not is a matter of if those are installed. So whether you install an app from whatever source, if the program makes use of play services it will use them if the app finds these on the device.

It doesn't matter if this app has network access or not, play services is convenient to use for app developers, so many chose these instead of implementing something they coded themselves.

You also granted Google to collect all your web searches. That is independent from play services, it happens whenever you use Google Search and when you are logged in with your Google account in that Browser.

You can see that in your picture, there appears a search you just made.

So when you are constantly logged in and granted to collect all activities, this was your personal choice and is unrelated to play services or GrapheneOS.

If you don't want this to happen, don't log into Google in your browser permanently and avoid Google Search.

Questionaccount

MineralWater

I know it was allowed on my account, I already deactivated it and deleted everything, but it still makes me wonder if Google can see which applications I'm using, even if I'm using Grapheneos.

de0u

Questionaccount I am by no means an expert on the Google Play infrastructure or on the operation of OpenCalc. That said, commit 688040b looks potentially interesting. It appears that there is some piece of "history" code that relies on a Google package. That may or may not be a red herring. But if the app is designed to use Play services then Play knows every time that the app uses a service provided by Play.

It may make sense to pose this question to the OpenCalc author.

de0u

Questionaccount I still think this question is relevant: "The 'app info' for an app will probably show where the app was installed from, which might shed light on the matter." It is probably useful to check whether the app that is believed to have been installed from F-Droid was actually installed from F-Droid, as opposed to the Play Store.

Questionaccount

de0u

I know I installed them from F-Droid because I've been trying to move all the apps I can to open source since last week, and that specifically includes those two.

Nevertheless, I am attaching screenshots here to prove that they were installed from F-Droid.

![https://ibb.co/236V2YMf](https://)

![https://ibb.co/4Z8zbn4x](https://)

starglider

Questionaccount If the app wants to talk to Play Services, it can and will (and thus Google will know whatever it is that the app wants to tell it). Especially if the app uses Play Services for some API, then PS will know that those APIs were called and by which app. That's my guess as to what happened here; the dev uses some Play API, and of course Google then knows when that API was called. A lot of apps (even ones installed outside of Play Store) will check for the Play APIs at runtime and use them if available. If not, apps may fall back to different implementations (e.g. persistent websocket for notifications instead of Firebase) or just disable some features (or, in the case of poorly-designed ones, crash).

Some people use separate profiles to prevent this sort of thing; if you keep these apps in a profile that doesn't have Play Services, then the app can't communicate with them. Of course, if they app really wants to tell Google something, it can always just use the regular old internet to do that. The only way to avoid that is to run the app in a separate profile and deny it network access (which GOS allows and will work, but obviously there is a convenience impact there).

Questionaccount

starglider

Yes, that was my question: if I don't want Google to know what I'm doing, I'll have to create a separate profile, because even in sandbox mode it's still able to snoop on what I'm doing.

graphny

Questionaccount Google [....] even in sandbox mode it's still able to snoop on what I'm doing.

Please read this again.

starglider If the app wants to talk to Play Services, it can and will (and thus Google will know whatever it is that the app wants to tell it). Especially if the app uses Play Services for some API, then PS will know that those APIs were called and by which app

If what happened to you is like what starglider guessed then google did not snoop on. That app gave info to google.
See unwat explaination here and this link too.

fid03

Questionaccount I can upload a link to the image here
![[https://ibb.co/nhSmXJ7](https://ibb.co/nhSmXJ7)](https://)

Doesn't that text just say that you visited OpenCalc's Play Store entry?

Questionaccount

fid03

Yes, what surprises me is Google Play's ability to know what time I opened that application, knowing that I installed it from F-Droid and blocked all its permissions.

de0u

Questionaccount Yes, what surprises me is Google Play's ability to know what time I opened that application, knowing that I installed it from F-Droid and blocked all its permissions.

I think fid03 's question is exactly whether or not the image indicates that Google Play knows when the application was opened. The image appears to indicate that the user of the device opened the Google Play app and visited the Play Store entry for the Play Store version of the app. If that is correct, it would not at all be surprising for the Play Store to know what the Play Store was doing at any given time.

fid03

de0u The image appears to indicate that the user of the device opened the Google Play app and visited the Play Store entry for the Play Store version of the app.

Yes, this is what I meant. From the image, it looks to me like that is the case.

nashgraph

Questionaccount It has nothing to do with GOS. It's a google account setting. And you should read the GOS FAQ regarding sandboxing btw.