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Comment by jumbopapa | Hacker News Reader

What are your guys thoughts on using Android? I really do prefer it to iOS, but the urge to de-Google has me seconding guessing my OS choice. I've thought about using LineageOS or something, but from what I understand is many people do not like using it without Google Play services enabled.

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I had the same thought. I guess it depends on what one actually uses the phone for. For me at the moment that makes me (somewhat) tied to the play store, since the keyboard app I use and several language learning apps are play-store only (not on f-droid)

What keyboard app are you using? I should probably quit using Gboard, but its been the best I've tried.

I still use Android, because... pretty much the only viable options for smartphone OSes are Android and iOS. There are plenty dozens of phones running Android: Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, Huawei, etc. And for iOS, well you only have iPhone.

I'd like to see more competitors in the game though: Firefox OS, Tizen, Sailfish OS, etc etc. So far, only Librem 5 looks promising. Hopefully it can gain much commercial and dev support.

I'm in the process to move Google and Facebook out of my life (to many privacy abuses). I now have my own email/domain (paid Fastmail account). This is a long process because I have my GMail email since the beginning of Gmail service.

On the phone side, I'm waiting for my pre-ordered "Librem 5" phone to replace my Google Pixel.

Look into microG, an open source play service alternative that's used alongside Lineage

Looks like it doesn't really have much implemented and what is implemented is likely buggy or limited https://github.com/microg/android_packages_apps_GmsCore/wiki...

core stuff should work - the goal is get off Google services, so you get bare minimum functionality.

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