microg-away.md

Hello everyone,

As many of you have noticed there had been very little involvement of me with microG over the last months.

tl;dr: I'll be back for microG work in 1-2 weeks.

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I am mostly unemployed since beginning this year. There are several reasons for that and things not working out as expected, but I am not completely unhappy about that.

Another open-source project I am maintaining had it's first release. This was originally planned to happen by end of last year, but that didn't work out as expected and thus took most of my time in January.

As I need to have some income, I worked intensely for two weeks in early February as a freelancer. This worked, but turned out to be more exhausting than expected, so the fourthcoming week I wasn't actually productive.

Due to reasons™ (not to be named or speculated on) I wasn't able to work productively in most of March.

I did work on several smaller and mostly independant things. For example I contributed to the advancement of OMEMO protocol (the end-to-end-encryption protocol of XMPP), including the first implementation of the new version.

These things were collaborative efforts and often long planned in advanced, so I handled them with priority.

Another open-source project I am maintaining is preparing for it's first release. This didn't happen yet, but hopefully will happen very soon.

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I do have several things done for microG that never made it into any repository:

• Major changes in UnifiedNlp (planned to become a 2.0 release).
• Major refactor of GMS repositories (#859)
• Various fixes for applications crashing.

As there is potential for these changes to conflict with pending PRs, I didn't felt comfortable with merging them just now to reduce the overall workload.

Now I heard that several people are working on forks of microG. That's great to see. But please do create pull requests and/or document in any other way what you changed, so I can merge/catch up as soon as I have the time to do so.

I'd also like to mention again that I am very open to grant contributor rights to the main microG repository to more people. "Requirements" are you are willing to contribute more than once, review and merge pull requests and fix issues arised through the changes you introduced. Please let me know through any means if you fit in here.

Marvin

Thanks for everything you've done so far! Been a microG user since the early days and I can't overstate how much you've done for the android ecosystem by providing a working alternative to play services.

Do you have any sort of crowdfunding or way of accepting donations? If you had such a thing and it became widely known, maybe you wouldn't have to work on anything but microG to make a living :) I for one would like to donate.

Sidenote: learned about your post at https://t.me/NoGoolag

Thanks for everything you've done so far! Been a microG user since the early days and I can't overstate how much you've done for the android ecosystem by providing a working alternative to play services.

Do you have any sort of crowdfunding or way of accepting donations? If you had such a thing and it became widely known, maybe you wouldn't have to work on anything but microG to make a living :) I for one would like to donate.

Sidenote: learned about your post at https://t.me/NoGoolag

You can donate to him at https://liberapay.com/microG/
I do agree, that this could / should quite a bit more prominent e.g. in the readme.md of the repository, or in the microG settings.

You can donate to him at https://liberapay.com/microG/
I do agree, that this could / should quite a bit more prominent e.g. in the Readme of the Reposetory, or in the microG settings.

Wut. Only €17.69 per week? Outrageous. More people should know about this. I'm telling the NoGoolag admins. Added my little something.

*Tips hat to @mar-v-in*

Happy to hear that, @mar-v-in !

Amazing, thank you so much

Great news, thanks for the update. What would we do without microG and especially LineageOS for microG ... 🥇

Hopefully it can be made fit for LOS 17 anytime soon, because the weekly updates for my OnePlus 6 stopped on 24th March due to the fact that LOS switched from 16 to 17.

Hey there. It has been a month since the original message. Any update on your status @mar-v-in?

the time window is important for us, because we need to make decisions if we still wait for L.OS /w microg or switch to other roms where we can get up to date security updates in the meanwhile.

Hi @tokariu, I am currently working on UnifiedNlp 2.0, which is a major update, improving support for latest Android versions and also adding some nice features that allow for tighter integration with fused location (as implemented in GmsCore).

Regarding LOS4microG, I don't know what the current status there is. This is mostly maintained by other community members, especially @corna.

@mar-v-in LOS for microG obviously can't make the jump to LOS 17 before microG has been made to work with Android 10. There is another patched fork of microG that's already working on Android 10, which is why OmniROM for microG is already based on Android 10.

I don't want to move to OmniROM for microG, especially because I have a OnePlus 5 and a OnePlus 6 here, and OmniROM is only supported on the OnePlus 6, so hopefully microG and LOS for microG gets the necessary love to make the jump to Android 10 as well.

@Master0ne it certainly is possible to build LOS 17 such that it works with current microG master (and fwiw previous releases).
As you know, microG needs patches to the system anyway and to support current UnifiedNlp, a further patch is needed.

For proper support of original/unpatched Android 10, major changes in UnifiedNlp are needed. The patch that just adds a permission fixes some symptoms, but not all of the underlying issues. It's good enough only when installing microG as a system service.

This is why I am working on UnifiedNlp 2.0. This has priority, but it's not blocking LOS 17.

Thanks @mar-v-in! I guess timewise there's no estimate on when UnifiedNlp 2.0 will be finished?

@deesnook there are a few critical bugs (those that cause the phone to reboot about once per hour) that need to be fixed, and then I guess it can be out as a beta. I'll then package a version of GmsCore integrating that beta.

Sounds great! Thanks again, keep up the great work

Just wondering, how would one go about to donate money to you/the project? I think a lot of people would like to contribute, MicroG is kinda a big thing to a lot of people.

@Mumrik93
Various ways to donate to me/the project.

• Recurring donation via GitHub sponsors. No processing fee. GitHub doubles every donation for the next 4 months through the GitHub sponsors matching fund. Note that you can also cancel recurring donations after the first payment. This is a personal donation to me.
• Recurring or one-time donation via Liberapay. Small processing fee. All project donations are currently forwarded to my personal account, but Liberapay also allows to distribute funds to other contributors.
• One-time donation via PayPal to mail address donate at microg.org. No fees when doing a "transaction to friends" in EUR.
• Send a mail to donate at microg.org and ask for personal account details for SEPA transaction.

Donated!
Thank you for such a great project!

@mar-v-in I may or may not have sent money via Stripe's direct debit in Liberapay because it was more fun than donating via SEPA directly, even though it has Stripe fees, hmm…

@fynngodau I understand it's just way more convenient to go with Liberapay. Stripe fee is 35c per transaction when using SEPA direct debit, so it's nothing to feel bad about :)

My donation should be in. Thank you very much for all your great work on microG, Marvin! Keep it up!!

@mar-v-in + 14 github sponsors in 24h!
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/gqbq7l/some_love_and_contributions_from_us_to_the_microg/

The community is with you Marvin, and I am sure that if you were to start a proper crowdfunding campaign (with news running through XDA and FOSS community outlets), you wouldn't have to fear security of income to bring forward your microG project! Thank you again for all your work!!

Recurring donation set up. Thanks @mar-v-in, keep up the great work!!

Recurring donation set up. Thanks @mar-v-in, keep up the great work!!

Any work at all would be splendid ... or does it only seem like nothing happens because commits are just not pushed to GitHub(?)

@joyofdata Indeed, @mar-v-in generally works locally before pushing batch of changes to GitHub. Mainly because he doesn’t want to push unfinished/polished code I guess.

@mar-v-in if you need help in testing, I have a spare device with Sony aosp running Q for testing here.

@mar-v-in, I signed in as a fan for the next 4 months as I like the "no processing fee & GitHub doubles every donation for the next 4 months" :-) I trust you'll get microg running on LOS17.1 soon. All the best!

Also donated! Thank you for the great work!

Thanks for your work. I'm contributing by a little bit now. Maybe I may rise that a little in the future.

Also created a donation. Please keep up the great work. We all really depend on it.

(I'm also very positively surprised that you are also the author of dino, which is another great project I use every day)

Is there a fundraising goal we need to meet?

@iot-resister I don't think so. It's more some kind of showing support because we really like this project.