In practice, the Google Play Services dependencies and other walled-garden initiatives from Google will make this less useful than it could otherwise be. But still, this is really cool.
In practice, the Google Play Services dependencies and other walled-garden initiatives from Google will make this less useful than it could otherwise be. But still, this is really cool.
MicroG of one of its wrappers takes care of it https://microg.cc/features/
https://github.com/kksimp/Mac.apk/wiki/Google-Accounts-and-P...
I guess, in practice this can also be likely be made to run google services, the same as they can run on custom ROMs. And it already lists Aurora store as a solution.
So it's definitely something for more tinkerer people, but still quite cool.
Everything aside from apps with SafetyNet dependencies. Banking apps come to mind.
Also, a lot of games. This is actually why I stopped playing Pokemon Go, and never picked up a worse gacha game habit haha
Pokémon Go had a good reason - it turned out to be foreign intelligence gathering operation and couldn't risk being corrupted with false data.
What? Niantic (Google) admitted they were training spatial AI models. I have not seen evidence that the data was a "foreign intelligence-gathering operation" and I would welcome a source.
Which models for who?
Sure, but who would use a banking app when the web site is right there and has more features and generally works better?
These days many banks only allows app for "enhanced safety"
Fortunately, there are (at least for now) many, many banks to choose from, and you can tell the app-only ones to suck it. There's also almost no switching cost. The last time I changed banks, it was mostly done in an afternoon.
Soo many more things than banking apps at this point. Things as normal as looking at train schedules, grocery store catalogues, ordering a taxi... sometimes have SafetyNet DRM.
When you publish apps on Google Play, the Play Developer Console even nags you to use harder obfuscation and implement Google's DRM to, allegedly, protect yourself and your users.
Can the EU finally make this shit illegal? Oh wait, they're pusing for mandatory DRM too... Fuck.
Banks want your money so try it anyway. Not all banks try to drive away their customers by preventing them from accessing their accounts.
time to RE play services
People are way ahead of you.
https://github.com/microg/GmsCore
hell ya, I love the internet
It's also pretty easy just to spin up bluestacks if you really need android apps on a mac.
You can run it with microg
Optimist take: this will matter less over time as more developers start targeting Steam devices
Or matter more, as chromeOS is killed and Android comes to laptop form factor?
...what steam devices? Steam Deck and Machine? I work in video games(at one of the largest publishers - worked at other two in the last few years) - and while we usually do some testing on the steam deck it's literally just to see if the windows version runs well. Full on Linux porting effort like Larian did for BG3 is very very rare and extremely hard to justify.
In your experience, is "Steam Deck Verified" attractive enough to fix any issues you might find when testing? I've been immensely curious about whether it's moved the needle at all
Most games run on Steam devices via Proton (Wine). You don't really need a native port in that case.
And I hate it with a passion. Publishers have no problem taking money from Linux users, only to ignore Linux-related bug reports and tell people “it’s not supported.”
I really hope Steam will use its position soon to either let users get refunds when devs break their games or force the gaming industry to support the Linux users they’re making money from.
That's really what the (Deck/Machine/SteamOS) Verified program is for. Valve tests games out on those platforms and reports results back for everyone on the store page. Publishers have the control to explicitly mark it as unsupported too.
...I mean, you're buying a windows version, then complaining that it's not running well on an unsupported operating system?
Steam is very upfront when you’re buying a windows game on mac. There’s a big banner saying it’s not for your OS and likely won’t work. There’s a compatibility icon for mac, and it’s filterable, for library and store, so you can get mac games. There’s an additional click-through screen on the store page with a checkbox. There’s a lot that’s filtered out!
The proton story pretends like you can run every windows game on steamos, verified or not. It’s quite different and tbh a little dishonest. I wonder how much of it is avoidance of alert fatigue (because many many unverified games do work) and how much if it is trying to sell users on steamos.
Well, just remember that Steam doesn't actually know where you intend to play the game. I buy most of my Steam games on my phone, and obviously there's no point in steam warning me that the game will not run on android.
> Full on Linux porting effort like Larian did for BG3 is very very rare and extremely hard to justify
Given the zeitgeist, how realistic are the calls to “just get AI to do it”? I’ve been rattled by just how good some one-shot (or otherwise low-human-effort) Claude ports of some games are (and I don’t mean “decomps”, but instead where an existing open-source and already-cross-platform codebase is ported over to new targets like WASM+Canvas, like C&C Generals: the AI-bros are in full-force posting demos of their new ports on a nearly daily basis - so if it’s as easy as these people say, why aren’t we seeing it from the major publishers?
> why aren’t we seeing it from the major publishers?
Models are just recently capable of reliably doing this type of deeper work, which is why you're only seeing it now. There hasn't really been enough time to see it. And still, why? Modern gaming on Linux is almost always on accident, with the devs targeting windows, with no thoughts of Linux at all. Seems like it would make more sense to point the AI at wine, to make linux run Windows better.
figuring out how to get PWA working would be a much better goal.
Can MicroG be ported?
Is this your experience or are you repeating something you heard somewhere?
I'm no expert on the matter, but I've developed and published multiple Android apps to the Play Store. Some of those apps have needed Google Play Services APIs. Google has also been actively making moves to lock down control and offering things like the Play Integrity API that some apps use.
By your phrasing, it sounds like you're implying my understanding is wrong somehow. If so, what am I missing?
I'm not the commenter but this is my experience in about 10% or so of cases. I've been running a network audit of baby tracking apps and the information they phone home with (results are pretty Orwellian so far) and a few of the apps have been virtually impossible to emulate without an active Google Play account that is verified against Google's servers.