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gruez • yesterday at 7:29 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

That's also incorrect, because the gmscompat app is just a helper app. Play services can and does request additional permissions. Those permissions are handled by the OS under the play services app, not gmscompat. If you want RCS for instance, you must grant play services and google messages phone and ICC auth access, which isn't seen in gmscompat at all.

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exceptione • yesterday at 8:00 PM

  > That's also incorrect, because the gmscompat app is just a helper app.
Hmm, ok. I was reasoning the helper app was needed to get around the default assumptions from Google Play Services.

  >  Those permissions are handled by the OS under the play services app
Yes, but I assume you don't mean that as that GOS makes special hard-coded provisions for the play services. GOS claims to run Play Services like any other unprivileged app, and so any additional permission it would want would have to be consented by the user and should be visible to the user. If not, then GOS wording would be quite a bit unfortunate at least.

EDIT: "GmsCompatConfig is the text-based configuration for the GrapheneOS sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer. It provides a large portion of the compatibility shims." [1] This seems to indicate that the permissions requested by Play Services are being honored with the shims from the helper app. That would alleviate the permission problem.

1. https://github.com/GrapheneOS/platform_packages_apps_GmsComp...