Hello.
I think I've given a lot of inexact information about apulse and
pulseaudio. Here is what I can see on Devuan Jessie.
The old Skype:i386, which required an i386 version of PulseAudio
doesn't see the microphone of my Toshiba laptop, but the newer
Skypeforlinux (x86_64 version) works fine.
Many things depend on libpulse0, including Palemoon (installed from
download.opensuze.org). libpulse0 is the only bit of Pulseaudio which
seems unavoidable. This is what Apulse provides (the libraries
libpulsecommon.so, libpulse.so and libpulse-simple.so), but, to actually
replace it in the sense of the package manager, it needs to be packaged,
or dependant software to be built from source.
For what concerns sound, Palemoon apparently only requires
libasound2, which doesn't depend on libpulse0; therefore the dependence
to libpulse0 ought to be more than indirect, could I say "colateral"?
Sadly, Palemoon also depends on dbus!
Didier