I had to manually upgrade to Android 12 because I didn’t get any security updates any more.
Pretty much all apps that I use worked fine prior to the update, without requiring a login with a Google account.
The first thing I noticed after the upgrade was that the Google Play Store app is suddenly suddenly installed alongside with AppLounge (as a system app, cannot uninstall it).
For most apps, notifications stopped working (e.g. Trade Republic, Scalable broker stopped working, Signal, WhatsApp and open source apps still work), Google Maps does not get a GPS fix any more (only if I use it via the browser instead of the app) and a lot of apps refuse to run at all, asking me to install PlayServices.
The MicroG Self-Check page looks all good, no missing check marks. However, Google device registration says “Not registered” and cloud messaging says “Disconnected”. SafetyNet is switched on but no apps are using it according to MicroG.
Does anybody know how to fix this? According to this document (https://e.foundation/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/e-state-of-degooglisation.pdf) I “do not have to use a personal Google
account to use those services” and I’d really like to keep it that way. Do I need to log into Google to make this work again or is there something else I can try.
I could update to the Tiramisu (13) dev build, would that help? I’d rather stay on the stable build for now though.
Sounds like you have a mixed experience wtih Android 12…
Can you show with a Printscreen the Google Play Store installation?
If some app’s dont work as they should maybe installing it again would help?
I have a Pixel 4a which had Android 11 with stable build, some apps didn’t work properly like banking app’s and I hade some issues with location/map based applications. I had a spare device to test Android 13 dev to check if thoose apps had the same issue. No issues after testing it, made me decide to switch from Android 11 stable to Android 13 dev (I dirty flashed it and took the risk of losing all my data or having issues, since it is not supported for e/OS/ side. I also made backups to be able to start from scratch). I also experienced some app’s not working the same as before because of the OS upgrade, for exmple I had to define some new settings which I only realized after opening thoose apps fro the first time. Now 2 Months later everything works fine and I don’t regret my decision. My comment is more sharing than really helping I am aware, I still hope it is helpful.
As it is a system app I cannot uninstall or reinstall it, I can just deactivate / activate it. Doesn’t make a difference though.
Did you just flash Android 13 over your existing installation and manage to preserve all your user data? When I updated to Android 12 I followed the instructions to flash the stock ROM first, so I obviously lost all my data. Is it safe to just do this directly?
For my old Nexus 5X I had to manually do all updates manually because of some modifications (rooted device) so I just flashed the stock image without the user data and it always worked like a charm.
Edit: was the GooglePlay app also bundled with the Android 13 ROM when you installed it? To me it seems a bit weird that it is there at all (it definitely wasn’t before I updated to Android 12).
Yeah I found that weird too. Why would /e/ include this app at all?
I definitely did not install it myself, it came with the image I downloaded from the official website.
I would be inclined to try to re flash the same build, preferably with Wipe system if your Recovery allows this. Then you could show that the issue is reproducible (or resolve the problem if it arrived in some unknown way).
Unfortunately I don’t remember which image I flashed initially. It’s been a few months and I didn’t have time to look into it. Since then I installed a few updates via the settings.
Anyway, I’ll try to update to 13 tomorrow if I find the time.
Instead of manually extracting the payload I’ll just wipe it and install it the recommended way to be safe. I’ll let you know how it went.
Update: so far everything appears to be working, there’s no Google Play app any more and some of the apps that complained about missing Play Services are starting without any issues. I haven’t tried all of them yet but it looks like this is resolved.
