Google framework download latest version. We untie the smartphone from the all-seeing eye of Google

Google services can be seen in the Android settings section showing battery health, among the active culprits in a significant decrease in battery life. Of course, the problem of vanishing charge through the functioning of unused built-in services has solutions, but first you need to understand the reasons for its occurrence. To do this, it is important to understand exactly what tasks Google services perform.

Google Account Manager: not much information is provided to users who access information about this service. Its main purpose is to synchronize Google account data, including email and other related tools, with a mobile device.

Google Services Framework: the service is responsible for managing a variety of communications with Google, including cloud messaging.

Google Contacts Sync: The service allows you to sync your Android contacts with your Google account contacts. You can find them after that in the official mail or at "google.com/contacts". Synchronization is bi-directional, so changing a contact on a mobile device or on the web will cause changes to be made everywhere.

Google Backup Transport: the service backs up application data on Google servers. Thus, when performing a factory reset on a mobile device, they can be restored.

Google Play Services: a suite of application services that Android can use to provide full functionality to third-party software. It includes a location service, which is the biggest drain on battery life. The set of services is updated "over the air" without a mandatory update of the operating system.

The main option that can help you choose a more efficient battery plan is the location services section. When the app needs to set the smartphone's coordinates, it uses Google Play Services, which in turn activates the built-in GPS hardware. In order to reduce the consumption of electricity consumption associated with location services, you need to go to the settings menu and find the section " Location” and switch to the mode “ battery saver". Activation will disable Google Play» Turn on GPS on your device when apps ask for location information.

Many different programs access Google services with this very request. The official search program, which includes the services "", uses this information to display weather information in specific areas. Disabling "Google Now" completely, along with location detection, will provide significant battery savings. To do this, you need to get into the settings of the search application and disable the Google Now service in the corresponding section.

If Google services is still draining your battery after changing your location setting, it's likely that integrated sync tools may be the culprit. To stabilize the situation, Android settings offer to uncheck the checkmark icon from the item responsible for automatic data synchronization. The system will stop syncing data in the background on its own. After that, the user will not receive notifications of new emails in Gmail, but the battery life of the device may increase.

In any case, services from Google should not be the main load on the battery. If the problem is still observed after disabling all of the above services, and third-party applications are not the obvious culprits, there may be a system error. Performing a factory reset in some cases will help get rid of Android difficulties. It is important to correctly prioritize service issues, understanding what each of them is responsible for, and disabling those that remain unused on a particular device.

You can buy a powerful and inexpensive (within $150) tablet or smartphone for experimenting with the Android system in the GearBest online store. In addition to the already low prices, there are often sales and promotions with big discounts.

Probably every user of an Android device has come across an annoying message "Google Play services has stopped - send a report." This is a system error and is not your fault, but there are still a number of steps you can take to fix this problem and prevent it from happening again.
Regardless of the reasons for the error, you can try the following solutions one by one to resolve it.

Solution #1. Clear cache

It may be enough to clear the cache of the Google Play Services app. To do this, open the settings on your device, tap "Application Manager" and select "Google Play Services" from the list. Tap "Clear Cache".

Be sure to restart your device after clearing the cache.

Solution #2. Re-add your Google account

If that doesn't work, you can remove and add your Google account again. It is known that on an Android device, you do almost everything through your Google account, which you entered at the very beginning after purchasing the device. So reinstalling it might help.
So, to delete an account, go to settings and find "Accounts". In the list, among other accounts, there will be a Google account. Tap it and you will be given the option to delete your account.

After that, you need to add it again. To do this, select the settings in the "Accounts" section, the item "Add an account". A wizard will open where you will go through the data entry steps again. After that, the problem may disappear. But there are further options for its solution.

Decision #3. Reinstall Google Play Services

We already tried to clear the cache in the first method, so now you can try reinstalling the services. Google Play Services is a basic application on an Android device that is required for everything else to work. Therefore, it cannot be completely removed. But you can reinstall all Google Play Services updates, and thus get their latest version. To do this, you only need to deactivate the Device Administrator. After deactivating the administrator, you can remove the updates and reinstall.

• To deactivate the Device Administrator, go to the "Security" settings, tap the "Device Administrators" section and check the box. The shutdown administrator screen appears.

Administrator is disabled.

• Now go to "Application Manager", select "Google Play Services". You will see that the "Uninstall Updates" button has appeared.

• Delete them.
• To install the updates again, try using any application. They won't work right now. First, you will be prompted to install service updates. Install them.
• After reinstalling updates, enable Device Administrator again
• Reboot your device

Now the error should be gone

Solution #4. Clear Google Services Framework Cache

And there is another way. Google Play Services is known to be dependent on the operation of the Google Services Framework application. This system application is responsible for communicating with Google servers and ensuring that your data is synchronized with them. If something is wrong with the Framework, then something is wrong with Google Play Services. Therefore, let's get the Google Services Framework working by clearing its cache.

To do this, go to "Application Manager" and find "Google Services Framework" in it. Tap it and tap Force Stop. Then tap "Clear Cache". Reboot your device.

After that, the error "Google Play services has stopped sending a report" will most likely disappear.

All error codes with additional solutions are described in more detail. If this does not help, it remains to advise you to contact professionals.

Google has quickly gone from a small search engine to a giant infrastructure that runs on our PCs, smartphones, tablets, and even TVs. Google relentlessly collects information about us, search queries are carefully logged, movements are tracked, and passwords, letters and contact information are stored for years to come. All this is an integral part of modernity, but we can quite change it.

Introduction

It's no secret that any Android device (at least the one certified by Google) contains not only components assembled from AOSP, but also an impressive amount of proprietary Google programs. These are the same Google Play, Gmail, Hangouts, Maps and a bunch of other applications, including a dialer and a camera (starting with KitKat).

For all these components, there is not only no source code, but in general there are no explanations about the principles of their work. Many of them were originally created to collect certain types of information and send them to Google's servers. So, for example, GoogleBackupTransport behaves, which is responsible for synchronizing the list of installed applications, passwords and other data, GoogleContactsSyncAdapter, which synchronizes the list of contacts, or ChromeBookmarksSyncAdapter, whose job is to synchronize browser bookmarks. Plus, collecting information about all queries in the search engine.

There's nothing wrong with the sync itself, of course, and it's a great mechanism that allows you to set up a new phone in minutes, and Google Now even manages to give us useful information based on our data (sometimes). The only problem is that all this destroys our privacy, because, as Snowden showed, under the hood of the NSA (and, most likely, a bunch of other services) is not only some kind of evil empire called Microsoft, but also Google, and as well as many other companies from the “we are not evil, but fluffy patrons” party.

In other words: Google will merge us all without any problems, and it’s not a fact that its employees, sitting in their offices with masseuses and dogs, do not laugh at the names from your contact book (everything is encrypted there, yes), drinking 15-year-old pu-erh from Yunnan province. Or maybe to hell with this Google? Let's take their Android, and let them go through the forest?

What is Google Apps

The latest KitKat-based custom firmware for my smartphone is 200 MB, however, to get the real experience from the smartphone, I also have to flash a gapps archive on top of it, which is 170 MB in size. Only after that I will get a system similar to the one pre-installed on the Nexus device, with all the goodies in the form of a desktop integrated with Google Now, a face-based screen lock, a camera with support for spherical shooting and a kilogram of Google software, from Google Play to Google Books.

I repeat once again: all this is closed software from Google, which in a good way cannot be distributed at all without their knowledge (therefore, it is not in custom firmware such as CyanogenMod), but since it is quite simple to extract it from Nexus-device firmware, you can find it on the Web a huge number of such archives, including heavily curtailed ones. In order to release an Android smartphone with a set of gapps on board, the manufacturer must send it for certification to Google, which, having assessed the quality and performance of the smartphone, will either give the go-ahead or kick it off (but this does not stop the Chinese at all).

This is how Google Apps gets to the smartphone. Of the users, 99% either use pre-installed applications, or install them on their own on an absolutely clean and completely anonymous firmware. And then, from the moment you enter the username and password, synchronization and information merging begins.

To figure out how this happens, let's unpack the same archive with gapps and take a look inside. We are interested in the /system/app and /system/priv-app directories, during installation their contents are copied to the directories of the same name inside the smartphone. The second directory is a KitKat innovation, it hosts applications that use system APIs marked as "private" and are not available to regular applications.

In the /system/app directory, we will find a large number of different Google applications, easily recognizable by the package name: Books.apk, Chrome.apk, Gmail2.apk and so on. Each of them will share information in their own way, but this is absolutely normal (yes, Google will know that you are reading Paulo Coelho through their app!). The greatest danger here is GoogleContactsSyncAdapter.apk, which is only responsible for sending a list of contacts to a remote server. We write down the name in a notebook and move on.

Most of the files in the /system/priv-app directory are the services and frameworks needed to run this whole synchronization and tracking thing:

• GoogleBackupTransport.apk - synchronizes data of installed applications, Wi-Fi passwords and some settings;
• GoogleLoginService.apk - connects the device with a Google account;
• GooglePartnerSetup.apk - allows third-party applications to access Google services;
• GoogleServicesFramwork.apk - a framework with various auxiliary functionality;
• Phonesky.apk - Play Store (oddly enough);
• PrebuiltGmsCore.apk - Google Services, as the name suggests, is the core of the entire gapps suite;
• Velvet.apk is a Google search that includes a desktop search bar and Google Now.

In essence, this is the part of Google Apps that is responsible for leaking our private information. Let's try to get rid of all this.

Method number 1. Disabling through the settings

The easiest way to untie a smartphone from Google is to use the standard system settings. The method is good in that it does not require root rights, nor the installation of custom firmware, nor custom recovery. Everything can be done in any stock firmware without losing access to your account and applications like Gmail (if necessary). However, no one will vouch for efficiency, since it is quite possible that some gapps components will continue to send data.

The main location of the sync settings is the menu "Settings -> Accounts -> Google -> [email protected]". Here you can turn off things like syncing contacts, app data, Gmail, Play Music, Google Keep, and more. All you need to do is just uncheck the boxes for the menu items you want. Next, go to the menu "Settings -\u003e Backup and reset" and remove the daws from the items "Data backup" and "Auto recovery".

Many sync settings are also handled by the Google Settings app, which is part of Google Services. With it, in particular, you can disable Google's access to the location ("Access to geodata -> Access to my geodata / Send geodata / Location history"), disable sending personal data to the search engine ("Search -> Personal data"), disable Google Now (“Search -> Google Now”) and disable remote management (“Remote management -> Remote device search / Remote lock and reset”).

In the same "Google Settings", by the way, you can disable any application that uses a Google account for authorization. This is not only about the software installed on the device, but in general about all applications ever used, including websites. For example, I found in this list a lot of sites that I had not visited for at least a couple of years.

In the event that you are not going to use Google services at all, it will be easier to disconnect your smartphone from your account completely, that is, simply delete it through the settings: “Settings -> Accounts -> Google -> [email protected]-> Menu Button -> Delete Account".

Most Google applications can be safely disabled through the settings: "Apps -> ALL -> the desired application -> Disable".

Google account settings
Google Settings

Method number 2. Cleaning the official firmware

In the event that the stock firmware has root rights, you can get rid of Google Apps by simply deleting them from your smartphone. As I said, they are all stored in the /system/app and /system/priv-app directories. For example, in the case of KitKat, the list of Google apps in the first directory would be:

• Books.apk - Google Books;
• CalendarGoogle.apk - Google Calendar;
• Chrome.apk - Google Chrome;
• CloudPrint.apk - cloud printing system;
• Drive.apk - Google Drive;
• GenieWidget.apk - news and weather widget;
• Gmail2.apk - Gmail;
• GoogleContactsSyncAdapter.apk - synchronization of contacts;
• GoogleEars.apk - Google Ears (similar to Shazam);
• GoogleEarth.apk - Google Earth;
• GoogleHome.apk - home screen with integrated Google Now;
• GoogleTTS.apk - speech synthesis system;
• Hangouts.apk - Google Hangouts;
• Keep.apk - Google Keep;
• LatinImeGoogle.apk - keyboard with gesture support;
• Magazines.apk - Google Magazines;
• Maps.apk - Google Maps;
• Music2.apk - Google Music;
• PlayGames.apk - Google PlayGames;
• PlusOne.apk - Google+;
• QuickOffice.apk - QuickOffice;
• Street.apk - Google Street;
• SunBeam.apk - live wallpaper SunBeam;
• Videos.apk - Google Movies;
• YouTube.apk - YouTube.

The /system/priv-app directory, in addition to those listed earlier, also stores the following files:

• CalendarProvider.apk - stores calendar data;
• GoogleFeedback.apk - sends a report on the use of Google Play;
• GoogleOneTimeInitializer.apk - wizard for installing additional Google applications;
• SetupWizard.apk - setup wizard at the first start;
• Wallet.apk - Google Wallet;
• talkback.apk - voice notification about events on the device.

The Gapps kit for KitKat, among other things, also includes a proprietary camera with support for spherical shooting and a proprietary desktop with integrated Google Now.

But that's not all. Google Apps depends on several frameworks, which are located in the /system/framework directory. These are com.google.android.maps.jar, com.google.android.media.effects.jar and com.google.widevine.software.drm.jar. There are also many libraries in the /system/lib directory that are used exclusively by Google apps. You don't have to delete them, but you can. Just to clean up the garbage. You can find a list of them on the website ][.

In past (and in future) versions of the system, the content of Google Apps is different, so before deleting it, I recommend downloading gapps of the desired version from the goo.im/gapps website, unpacking it using WinRar and viewing the contents. You should also consider the dependence of some applications from the market on Google applications, I will talk more about this later.

This is only a part of the libraries included in the gapps package

Method number 3. Custom firmware without gapps

The previous method can be greatly simplified if you simply install custom firmware on your smartphone without Google Apps. In this case, the smartphone / tablet will be crystal clear without any reference to Google. The disadvantage of this method is the lack of Google Play, but you can either replace it with a third-party app store (more on that below), or use the following method, which includes installing a stripped-down version of Google Apps.

Method number 4. Google Play and nothing else

This way of partially unlinking from Google is a kind of compromise. It does not solve the problem of surveillance - at least without the settings from the first method - but it allows you not to litter the system with a bunch of useless software that will hang in the background and eat up memory. The essence is simple - we install custom firmware and fill it with a minimalistic version of gapps, which includes only Google Play.

There are many such minimal gapps builds on the Web, but I would recommend using the time-tested BaNkS Gapps, namely the “month-day GApps Core 4.4.2 signed.zip". They work on any smartphone, are compatible with ART, and include only the core gapps files listed in What is Gapps, framework files, and a few libraries. Basically, it's Google Play, sync tools and nothing else.

Change the search engine to DuckDuckGo

Even after completely disabling sync, the “built-in” Google search bar will remain on the home screen. In the stock firmware of some manufacturers (Samsung, for example), this is just a widget that can be easily removed from the screen. In pure Android and devices from many other manufacturers, it is "sewn" into the home screen, but it can be removed by disabling all search from Google (along with Google Now) using the menu "Settings -> Applications -> All -> Google search -> Disable" or by installing a third-party launcher. Next, just download DuckDuckGo from the market or another app store and add the widget of the same name to your home screen.

Third party market

The second and third methods involve completely getting rid of Google Apps, including Google Play and the ability to log in using a Google account, so we must find a way to install applications easily and conveniently, which would not force us to download them ourselves, and then transfer them to a memory card and set manually. One such way is to install a third-party market.

At the moment, there are three more or less viable alternatives to Google Play. These are Amazon Appstore , Yandex.Store and 1Mobile Market . Each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages, which mainly come down to the number of applications and payment methods:

• Amazon Appstore is the most famous app store after Google Play. Contains over 75,000 apps (compared to 800,000 on Google Play), each hand-checked for quality, just like iTunes for iOS. You can pay with a credit card or Amazon Coins, which are given as a gift for buying a Kindle Fire tablet or as a gift from another user. One of the most interesting features of the store is the daily giveaway of one of the paid applications.
• Yandex.Store - a store from Yandex. Contains more than 85 thousand applications, each of which is checked by Kaspersky Anti-Virus. It doesn’t stand out in particular, but it has a killer feature in the form of the ability to pay for purchases using the Yandex.Money service or a mobile phone account.
• 1Mobile Market is the largest third-party repository of Android apps, with over 500,000 apps. It differs from others in the presence of exclusively free applications (not to be confused with pirated ones), because of which it allows you not to go through the account registration stage and remain anonymous.

Applications in all three markets have original digital signatures of the application developers, which allows them to be used simultaneously. An application installed from one market can be updated from another without problems, and when deleted, it will disappear from the list of installed ones in all at once. However, you will have to buy separately.

Amazon App Store
Yandex Market 1Mobile market

Open Source Market

In addition to those described in the article, as well as many other lesser-known app stores, you can find a repository different from the rest on the Web. It is completely anonymous and contains only free software distributed under licenses approved by the FSF. There are only a thousand applications in F-Droid, but all of them are guaranteed to be free of backdoors and other systems for disclosing personal data. It is F-Droid that is used as the default market in the free Replicant Android firmware.

Solving the problem of application dependency on Google Apps

Despite the fact that gapps components are not part of the official Android API, some applications still expect to see them in the system, which can cause a number of problems - from the complete inoperability of the application to the loss of some of its functions. Some applications will refuse to install due to the lack of Google Maps API, others crash immediately after launch without finding it, others include direct links to Google Play, which can lead to crashes and incorrect work.

To address these issues, XDA user MaR-V-iN started the NOGAPPS project, which is developing a set of open source components to replace the original Google Apps functionality. There are currently three replacement components available:

• Network Location is a geolocation service based on Wi-Fi and GSM base stations. Based on Apple's IP address database and open database of base stations;
• Maps API - interface replacement for Google Maps based on OpenStreetMap;
• BlankStore is an open source alternative to the Play Store client. Allows you to install free applications from the Google store, but is not recommended for use due to possible sanctions from the search engine (this is prohibited by their rules).

Components are installed separately and in different ways. Network Location can be manually copied to the /system/app/ directory in Android 2.3–4.3 or to the /system/priv-app/ directory in KitKat (in this case, you should use the NetworkLocation-gms.apk file). The Maps API is installed by flashing the nogapps-maps.zip file through the recovery console. To install the market, you will have to not only copy the file, but also generate an Android ID on a large machine, but since this is not recommended, I will not talk about it and limit myself to a link to the instructions.

After all the manipulations, the software should work correctly.

conclusions

For Google, Android is useless without its own apps, so it's not surprising that the company puts the tastiest parts of the system into them and keeps the code private. However, in this article, I showed that there is life without gapps and it can be even easier and more convenient than with Google.