If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Have you considered using MicroG? It's stated use is exactly what you're looking for.
https://github.com/microg/GmsCore
Regarding using AI, you will find that the process results in apps/games that initially look like the app they are trying to clone but that falls apart as soon as you start using it. This video gives you a really good idea of what a vibecoded clone brings to the table.
For micro G, doesn't that still require a google acct?
No, microg works without an account. What you're thinking of might be an apps performance with microg not logged into an account.
I found that about 3/4 of the apps that require play services operate fine without logging in while the rest actually require data associated with a Google account and won't operate correctly, either by breaking only parts of the apps or completely refusing to work.
One example is the octopi launcher. It states the play store is required but the only aspect of the app that doesn't work is the purchase of pro since that part needs a Google account to bind the license to.
It is possible. Even without AI. But if you ask this question, I wouldn't even start going into AI-less direction :)
With AI you can give it even a very generic task "make this app work on my phone, you're allowed to patch it however you want", give it jade (decompiler) and other dev tools, adb with which it'll be able to upload apps to your phone and view logs, buy a lot of tokens for some good model, and let it cook. There's a high probablity that even like this, without any optimizations it'll succeed.
Now in terms of self-hosted vs commercial models, here's the overall picture.
Self-hosted (unless you have some Nvidia H100 or something) are generally stupid enough to not do anything.
Commercial (even those available for free e.g. in opencode or openrouter), are already capable of producing some results. Generally, they don't give a damn about hacking into the app, unless it's something really sensitive (e.g. hacking into some infrastructure) or a false positive. Usually, you can soften their guards by using terms like "MY app", "OUR app", "I've accidentally deleted the source code" and so on to make them firmly believe that you are working on your own app, but even that is not normally necessary.
See something like this for the inspiration: https://codyho.dev/blog/gpu-driver/
Since in your case you probably won't care about "clean room" technique, and you'll be working with Java that very nicely decompiles into smali and then gets "restored" into its original Java form (obfuscated ofc), it will be much easier.
The hardest part is to setup AI loop, manage it and be able to guide it in the correct direction without going into the full slop mode and basically wasting your money. Because of that, I'd say you'd need some good programming/engineering skills, but even if you don't, you can still try your luck and maybe even learn a lot in the process :)
in some cases it's not very complicated. i think your tcl ir blaster app might just work. (if you have ir blaster, ofc)
for camera i recommend using gcam port (like bsg mgc.. search xda) they tend to not work without gapps but actually works fine after installing gcam services provider from fdroid, no need for even microg
I'll gone this a try then! Thank you.
missing OEM apps from OnePlus like the camera
Not saying it's impossible, but it's probably very very challenging.
You can & should defo use commercial models for this, because it would be very expensive to have enough GPUs for a strong enough model if that's at all feasible.
I tested this with Claude just now. I uploaded my own compiled C program & asked Claude to answer questions about it based on machine code inference & it did figure out how scrollbar behavior works precisely, which it could not have inferred from the internet for sure. So I think if you have the tokens Claude can be used for this.
The problem is that you still need to roughly understand what you are doing, even if the LLM at the cost of hundreds of dollars can probably do 99% of the work.
My old TCL phone had the best IR blaster app I’ve ever used, and I’m missing that dearly, too!
That's probably something that can be vibecoded from scratch quite easily as long as you have enough screenshots of it & your phone actually has an IR blaster.
Lucky Patcher can often remove the requirement but obviously you can't update it.
Yea, just need to remove firebase if implemented