I would love to, but I'm not sure how yet without a major re-write. The augmented reality code we completely rely on is part of Google Play Services for AR. I definitely do understand the benefit of degoogling, so maybe it can be a community effort once I opensource it.
Man, we're so bad at naming, that we keep joking about it... And trying to satire that with internal codenames (the ones engineers give without adult supervision)... And somehow those often seem better than the external names :(
It could also possibly work on iOS, but there's a catch we have not yet explored. We're relying on something called the "confidence" score in the ToF camera API, which has 8 possible values (3 bits) in Android, but from what I last saw, has only 3 possible values total in iOS. It's not clear how this lack of info exposed by the APi will affect accuracy.
This is something we'd have to separately test, and ultimately make a wholly different app for if it's feasible on iOS.
There's no reason it has to be worse. It's good development practice to design your system to loosely couple with dependencies you have no control over. Worst case you could have two versions, and the one that supports google services works better for whatever imagined reason.
Is there a support group or discord for degooglers? I did it a month or so ago and am still dealing with the ramifications. Most recently I used App Warden to disable all the spyware libs (including Google's) shipped with WeChat. They detected this, and banned my 10 year old account with all my friends and relatives. Been struggling for two days trying to get it reactivated, cuz it will be extremely difficult to travel back to China without it. I am not blind to the irony of keeping Tencent on my phone as I remove Google.
What would be really helpful is a database of apps, similar to the WINE project, maintaining how well they work on a de-googled phone, with a table, columns being "no root", "rooted", "with microg", etc, and a WINE style rating of how well it works and what problems you'll run in to.
You would know which banking services, etc don't work well or at all and could choose your establishments with foresight.
There is a GitHub repo[1] with a very limited list last time I checked. That the best I could fined in my degoogled time.
The Techlore Youtube-Channel-Community (yes, I realise the irony) also seems like a reasonably healthy place to start.
There is also a bunch of telegram groups with NoGoolag[2] at the center. I would not recommend for the 70:30 mix of conspiracy and tech support but they are at least technically very knowledgeabl, and sometimes helpful, even considering their almost 'religious' technical beliefs.
Sorry I'm not aware of anything like this. I went "all in" : I just installed GrapheneOS on my phone, Linux on my desktop and stopped using anything Google related (except YouTube that I watch in a dedicated browser).
Interesting question. Mainly as mentioned above we needed Google Play Services for AR. Nothing else stands out at a high level.
However there is a clear bottleneck with the Google AR team for features that the community really wants. While it's understandable, perhaps the open source libraries aren't the priority or there's short staffing, there are issues like this one - https://github.com/google-ar/arcore-android-sdk/issues/153 - that have been open since Jan 2018. This one asks that we can use the smartphone flashlight simultaneously with ARCore, but there's no visibility on how close we are at the moment. This feature would have likely improved our work's performance greatly, but even in general, many other AR developers are asking for it.
Re: overcoming it, there's not much we can do in this case. We just didn't implement the feature.
I apologize Sriram I actually I meant to ask that to the user jmnicolas who asked you to for de-googled application; Yet you provided valuable information.
Long standing issues/feature requests are typical of Google's Android ecosystem, Regardless I eagerly await for your release. I think ToF based spy-camera detection could make a great addition to the women safety apps in India.
