As you know, I’ve gone Google App-less, or “gappless”. But, for better or worse, not all of my ROM users have done the same. Typically, when you build a custom ROM, you build it without things like ROOT or GAPPS, and leave it to the ROM user to decide what they would like to install. In the case of installing GAPPS, they typically use TWRP to flash an opengapps zip file that installs all the desired Google Apps.
This is useful, because there are lots of Google Apps, and users may want some of them, but not all of them. Thus, when you install your zip from opengapps, you choose how many Google Apps you would like, pico, nano, mini, stock, full, etc., the bigger the tag, the more Google Apps you get.
Unfortunately, my SODP based AOSP ROM has an issue with Gapps. As I said, I don’t use Gapps anymore, but my users reported that they could not install Gapps. So I tried installing it myself to see what the issue was. Sure enough, it would install properly, but when you booted into the phone, the Gapps were not there! It was as if they never installed. I’d like to take credit for the Gapps resistant ROM, but it was purely unintentional.
So, this may seem counter productive, but I’ve release a build with built in Gapps as well. Since the end user can’t install it themselves, you can actually follow opengapps guide to build your ROM with Gapps included in the build. While I don’t like using Gapps anymore, I certainly want others to have the freedom to do so. The only difficult thing was figuring out which level of Gapps to include. In the end I decided with “stock”, which is less that full or all, and more than pico, nano, and mini. I figure that if you want Gapps, you probably want the standard, or stock amount of programs.
The only downside, is it makes my build almost three times the size! Believe me, it took three times longer to upload too! I think next go around, I’ll probably use mini for the Gapps level, to save myself some uploading bandwidth. I of course, still release my own builds without Gapps, for those so inclined.
Linux – keep it simple.