There are over a half billion Android users in China who are prevented from using any of Google Play Services, and they're still fine.

AOSP may not be as fully featured as it could be, but it's clearly quite possible to use Android without Google.

They mostly have their own version of it, just developed by Chinese companies and controlled by the government. From what I have seen, it's quite on par with Google Play Services.

Google Play Services are pretty much replaced by Baidus package there which pretty much does a lot of things the same way.

And those APIs actually rely on things hosted on Google servers (Push notification system, fused location system, Google login and other come to mind) which can't exist without Googles involvement.

Making people implement their own services proved to be problematic, because most developers didn't care enough to optimize their services for low memory and battery usage, resulting in terrible battery life on Android devices. Since Android must compete against iOS, a central system had to be established to reach similar battery life.

>fused location system ... which can't exist without Googles involvement

That's kind of a cop-out though. It certainly could exist without Google's involvement if the location provider were a pluggable module within AOSP. microG does this - my phone supports the fused location API using Mozilla's location database instead of Google's. (There are other modules too, like a local database of cell towers if you're willing to dedicate some storage to it.)

Push notifications and Google login sure, but some of what's in the Play Services APIs should really be in AOSP, IMO.

EDIT: For that matter, you could even have the push provider available as a module too, even though Google's push service is the only one currently available.

How would you have push provider available as a module? The sender is communicating with a particular push provider.

The client could provide the push service to use when initially setting up push notifications for that app. I believe that's how Web Push works.

Sure and you can use microG and other services on your Google free phone. I do agree that flashing firmware without Google services should be easier on devices, but the actors preventing that aren't Google (locked bootloaders are demanded by your American telcos like Verizon, DRM lockdown is demanded by the copyright lobby and SoC vendors refuse to release the kernel sources).

But in general, I don't get what your expectation is, that Google will spend millions developing an OS and then give it to competition or deliberately provide worse user experience than their main competitor?

Yeah and most of them wouldn't exist without those APIs. These complaints often feel like they're trying to square a circle.

In what way does that mean that Google services are required for Android? Lots of Linux games rely on Steam being present.

If you don't want Steam, don't use games that require it. If you don't want Google services like Google's Maps widget or its push messaging service or its game leaderboard, use apps that use another data source for maps and another persistent connection for push messages and another leaderboard service.

F-Droid and Amazon's App Store are filled entirely with apps that don't (can't) use Google's services, yet many on HN blindly continue to claim that this is not possible.