One of the biggest problems is probably that there's almost no way of using an android phone and purchase apps without a google account (which will be then linked to purchases and activities).
There's two caveats: (a) it's a little unstable with no Google account but using a throwaway Google account fixes this, and (b) it doesn't get you away from Google because they still have a lot of ways to track you in Android without an account, but...
You can disable Play services and install Aurora Store from F-Droid and have a very reasonable Android experience with no Google account.
Aurora Store is a Play Store client that doesn't require a Google account, so you can get access to all the "normal" commercial apps and games that are absent on F-Droid. The developers use a central account for API access which can get rate limited and get blocked sometimes (they recommend you sign in with your own throwaway Google account to avoid this), but otherwise it's better than Play Store in many ways.
Some apps will not work without Play services but I've found that in most cases it's either a matter of:
- some annoying notification function of the app doesn't work but the rest of the app works fine
- in some rare cases, apps with a strong reliance on Play services have alternative independent builds available as apk from their own website
You can also just leave Play services enabled and simply never log into your Google account (the Aurora account login is separate, it doesn't link into the rest of the device) BUT if you do this Google will plague you with prompts to login for all eternity.
Honestly, we need a optimised non-custom rom alternative to smartphone operating systems, which is not iOS or google/android.
While the custom-rom development has come a long way, it's to fiddly, often lacks long-term support, shortcomings in terms of stability (network/singal disruptions, battery usage, crashes, bricks)and even privacy.
And so here we are, living in a world of a million different sized rectangles; all running Android.
> Honestly, we need a optimised non-custom rom alternative to smartphone operating systems, which is not iOS or google/android.
Symbian was way ahead for its time. But I'm just glad we have some developments such as PinePhone and Librem
Meego was it.
Nokia messed up by not actually sharing it properly like the Android Alliance or whatever it was called did.
Nokia went under and Android is everywhere :-(
[1]: https://microg.org/
It's not perfect, but works well enough for daily use in my experience.
So it seems it's possible?
(Not to mention many deGoogled Android builds like Lineage which, ironically, usually run best on Google phones due to their published sources).
Get an iPhone then? Or a feature-phone?