If you are worried about your privacy, yes, you must get rid of Google Play Services. However a majors part of your apps may be broken as too much rely on this services and only in those services.

If you want apps to based on this layer of Google mess, have a look on some open spruce alternatives of your favorite apps. Maybe some of them won’t embed Google Play Services. But keep in mind you may lose some features like notifications from Google devices or fine tunes location.

You can have a look on microG or Open GApps for alternatives. However you may need to hack your device to flash them.

What you can do, for example:

• check if you can flash alternatives (possible to root and before unlock the boot loader)
• maybe check if you can flash another ROM ; projects list the compatible devices. Have a look on LineageOS, GrapheneOS or also /e/OS

Be sure also the issues you have in your project have the suitable labels to help future contributors to pick easily some of them, i.e. labels like “help wanted” or “good first issue”.

You can also refer to best practices listed and explained for example in Advent of Open Source so as to have a nice and user-friendly repo: https://adventofopensource.com/

BTW I hope any project won’t increase the Z version only by including Dependabot commits, it would be insane. Release must be documented, tested, with CHANGELOG updated. If some maintainers just accept Dependabot commits without checking, move away. That’s just simple crappy auto-merge.

Nice idea 👍

That is the reason why some developers are “full stack”. All computers are stacked 🤪

Yes you should definitely check before whether or not the device is supported. You can find it for LineageOS here: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

You may also have a look on /e/OS: https://doc.e.foundation/devices