De-Googled Android Experience | Hacker News Reader

De-Googled Android Experience

swalladge.net

68 pointsswalladge11 comments

I de-Googled my Android 3 months ago, and the article reads as if I wrote it. I can totally relate to everything!

Without the Play store, I had to take long hard look at what apps are really essential to me, for which I cannot find a FOSS alternative. Turns out, except Spotify and banking, there was none! Without Google Play, I did not really feel the need to fill my phone with various apps... My primary email and SMS was all the communication I needed.

In the beginning, I missed my notifications. I felt almost uneasy if I did not check my phone every 30 minutes because I felt like I could be missing some urgent notification. However, after only a week, I noticed that nothing of importance was lost, but more importantly, how much focus I reclaimed!

I know this sounds cheesy, but de-cluttering my phone made me realize how much all the apps strived for my attention all the time.

I made a similar switch to Lineage about a year ago, and it's also been absolutely great. No regrets whatsoever. Also, AFAIK you can root your phone to fool play store checks, using something like Magisk if that's important enough.

There's also LineageOS for MicroG [1] which bakes in MicroG for you. Then there's the unfortunately named /e/ [2] which is based on the former and trying to build a usable privacy-focused mobile OS on top of that.

[1] https://lineage.microg.org/

[2] https://e.foundation/

I've been wondering for a while: why does google play require a sign-in to install apps?

Mozilla lets anyone download addons from anywhere, likewise I should be able to download an apk to my desktop and install on my phone.

The point is to tie you into the Google ecosystem. That's the entire purpose of Android, really.

Laziness/cost. It would be more difficult to build app syncing, installing apps from your web browser, counting installs and reviews without spam, purchasing and licensing, etc. without being able to assume there is an associated account to tie it all together. They could partially disable some features, but that would be also be a little more work and still not stop the complaints from people who don't want to sign in.

Another that I had trouble with was location, since I occasionally need maps. microG's NLP thing really seemed to dislike my phone.

How far can you get by using a vanilla Google Android but enabling all privacy settings and not using any Google services?

Even assuming you can get android to a state where it never automatically sends data to Google on its own with the privacy settings (I'm not sure how possible this really is) and you never use any Google apps, it's still a moot point unless you don't use any apps at all because pretty much all apps in the app store use google services / ads.

That's why you need one of the libraries that attempts to replace the google services.

You can't. On all stock roms the google play services is installed, which gives google full administrator access to the device with no way to disable it. Google has been known to abuse that privilege for things like location tracking without your permission [1].

[1]: https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/235594-yes-google-play-is...

Actually, I was able to effectovely disable Play Services and others using Marcel Bokhorst's 'NetGuard Pro', a clever firewall that allows detailed, as well as wholesale blocking. This allowed me to test the DeGoogled waters before finally flashing my phone (Essential PH1). NetGuard opened my eyes to what apps were requesting upon launch and it was quite disturbing. I ultimately ended up AOSP without any G services, and couldn't be happier. Signal has their websockets version on their site, and it indeed chews through battery faster, but a fair tradeoff for breaking away from incessant tracking and logging.

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