At least in Android 7 you can explicitly allow this for a specific app. This question can even be triggered by the app itself (e.g. Conversations and Signal ask you to do this if they can't use GCM). This is hopefully still possible.
> It's the turning of an era for Android, and my interests have moved elsewhere (from an app platform perspective, embedded Android is still vialble since everything you ship runs as a system app with no restrictions).
Google making it more and more difficult to avoid gapps is nothing new.
There is some level of opt-out, but it doesn't work reliably, and your app might still get killed.
Even the K9 team had issues with that, and many other open apps did so, too. I've been trying to work some kind of push messaging into the IRC bouncer for which I wrote an Android client, but the issues with legality (I can't just connect to a third party without explicit opt in), API keys (people who host an IRC bouncer don't want to register with Google), liability (I don't want to relay all messages through a server of my own), Google's ToS (I can't just publish an API key for everyone to use), confidentiality (I can't actually put content into the FCM messages due to legal issues), etc are so problematic that it's basically stalled everything.
I've filed a complaint with the EU, this seems like the only option I've got left. I can't tell everyone running a bouncer to register with Google, I can't relay all messages of all IRC users through a server of mine, and I can't bake in a Google API key into IRC bouncers (as that violates Google's ToS)
Can you point me to the relevant info? This is news to me (and sounds exciting).
No doubt we've seen it coming for awhile. But I'm still sad to see it finally come to this, at least ideologically. iOS is a closed ecosystem that's been opening up. Android was an open ecosystem that's becoming more locked down.
I looked into this. It seems this is something that was added in M pertaining to Doze and App Stanby modes and is not related to the new O background execution limits (which apply generally). In any event, app exemptions must be approved by Google so we've already crossed the open platform line. They do list that voip-style/message apps will receive approval if they can't use FCM for some technical reason: https://developer.android.com/training/monitoring-device-sta...
> It's the turning of an era for Android, and my interests have moved elsewhere (from an app platform perspective, embedded Android is still vialble since everything you ship runs as a system app with no restrictions).
Google making it more and more difficult to avoid gapps is nothing new.