If I remember correctly, a permanent notification can keep the app running and prevent it from being killed by the battery optimization.
That doesn’t solve the pedometer, obviously.
I’d really love to not having to use the Google platform APIs if there were any other ways. We did try but we found out that in order to build your own pedometer that would be anything near the same reliability as the platform ones it takes absolutely enormous time commitment and you need a ton of different devices to try it out on. Add in to the mix that a lot of Chinese phones have a ton of battery optimization that you can’t turn off which might kill your background pedometer to the game meaning that you’d need to have the game open for it to record steps.
Add in to the mix that you need to be constantly supporting all of the different changes happening on new devices and OS versions coming out and what we found out is that instead of being a game developer you become a full time pedometer developer.
When you’re developing a game it’s pretty much not an option spending at least a year (and then continuous support) doing all of that work which you’d much rather spend on making the game itself.
There are some workarounds at least on GrapheneOS in Sandbox mode where you can get the game working from what I’ve heard!
Gumus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
kossa@feddit.org 3 days ago
I use Paseo as a step counter. It works reliable without Google Services. Maybe you can get some inspiration from how they do it.
Would be very interested in a GServices free version.
walkscape@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I think they use SensorManager API which we could also use if Google Play Services isn’t available. SensorManager just has one big downside that it loses your steps if you restart your device, but at least it’d be better than nothing on de-googled devices.