Has the dev team made an active decision not to include Android System Intelligence in the stock image? Seems like it would be perfect to include as a sandboxed Google compatibility app.
Android System Intelligence is required in order to enable useful Pixel features like Automatic Captions, Smart Text Selection, Smart Image Selection, and Call Screening (as well as other nice-to-have features like Ambient Music detection). The code for all of these is basically already present in AOSP, but depends on ASI to operate, and ASI uses READ_DEVICE_CONFIG
which requires the preinstalled
protection flag.
Shipping ASI in the default apps repo would provide the best of both worlds, allowing users to make the choice whether to open a minor privacy vulnerability in order to access more features, the exact same way that the Google sandbox and hardening compatibility toggles do. I know we're very resistant to adding more apps to the default repo (for good reason!) so an alternative solution would just be to make the READ_DEVICE_CONFIG
permission user-grantable just like we did with INTERNET
permission. (I don't know how much of a security risk this permission is by itself, as I couldn't find clear info on what exactly it permits apps to do. A compromise would be to make it user-grantable but only via ADB, not via the Permissions manager, so users would REALLY have to intentionally want to enable it).
I can open this as an issue on Github, but I don't want to waste those folks' time if it turns out they have already considered and decided against allowing ASI to work on Graphene. Does anyone know if that's the case?