Anybody have experience using something like this (or others like GrapheneOS) as a daily driver?
I’m interested in moving away from Apple and big tech in general, but I don’t know how practical that is yet.
I’m interested in moving away from Apple and big tech in general, but I don’t know how practical that is yet.
Self-hosted NextCloud replaced Drive/Dropbox, and with some plugins it also does phone/location tracking, secure messaging and video calls, TODO lists, and some more. Self-hosted PhotoPrism replaces Google Photos.
The phone experience hasn't been bad. One thing that came up initially is that most of the open source apps aren't as "pretty", and the UX just isn't as good. I don't care about it too much, and I'm fine with overall using the phone less anyway. The issue that comes up on a regular basis is the Google Maps replacement. OSMand is a great app, but like someone else mentioned it's more of a "look up the address and type it in" experience than a "show me all Thai restaurants in the area" experience. IMO small price to pay, I've been using GPS much less, and I've gotten much better at navigating with my "mental map".
In fact I hope once I become familiar with everything that I can start contributing to some of the open source projects in the de-Googled space.
If I’m going to become a user of some of this stuff, seems like a good use of my time to also help move it forward.
LineageOS (and perhaps other ROMs) have the option to disable all networking features for apps, so I actually still use Google Camera, Google Photos (as an offline gallery) and Gboard (again all offline) and the majority of features just work. They don't complain about missing Google Services, nor about the missing internet connection.
There are great alternatives to apps like YouTube (NewPipe), Maps (OSMand), Chrome (Chromium, or I use a browser called Privacy Browser on F-droid) and I have tried apps like Spotify and they too work without Google services (although I guess some features might be lacking).
F-droid is an amazing service and has many FOSS alternatives to apps. I found myself today recompiling my browser application to fix some small bugs which just made me sit back in my chair and think "that is so cool"!
I think making the change can be gradual (for example switching to LineageOS for MicroG to get a subset of working Google services) before fully de-Googling, but the change is definitely possible (and easy) to make.
It sounds like LineageOS for MicroG might be the friendliest way to ease into this for me.
LineageOS is superb for getting rid of stock OS bloatware and spyware and I have an experience on it that's better than stock Android. However it doesn't have hardened security like GrapheneOS, which is why I want to move to that later. On the other hand microG is needed for push notifications and maps APIs, which GrapheneOS doesn't support so I'm not sure how the fallback options of some of my currently used apps will fare on it.
If microG turns out to be necessary for my workflow then I'll get CalyxOS instead, since it includes microG and is somewhere between LineageOS and GrapheneOS in terms of security.
This thread has encouraged me to give this a go!
1. E-Mail: Using Fairmail from F-Droid (paid version though) is great for GMail and most other Providers. Notifications are usually faster than G-Mail in the Browser. 2. WebBrowser: Using Fennec from F-Droid with Adblock. The Chromium Version integrated in Graphene is propably more secure though. But adblock is life... 3. OsmAnd from F-Droid for Navigation. Works well enough, UI is clunky though. But Offline Maps are pretty sweet to have. 4. Most Messengers work, Notifications are spotty sometimes. Telegram Signal, Element, Threema all do fine though Element sucks battery life down to unaccaptable levels. Haven´t and won´t test whatsapp. 5. OpenCamera + Nextcloud is good for Cloudsyncing and Camera. 6. Password Management with AndOTP and KeePassXC is sweet and integration of the fingerprint sensor is really useful. Useful enough that i miss it on my desktop linux 7. Paypal App works, my Banks app work but YMMV. 8. Biggest annoyances are local german Taxi Apps. They all don´t work but i was able to work around it using a website. Still can´t pay via app. ...Well i don't use my phone for much more than that.
Battery Life is great, Security and Privacy is also good. You can lookup App Compatibility to a degree here: https://plexus.techlore.tech/
In terms of classical smartphone features, I know what I don't get out of the box due to the lack of Google Services (Assistant, Picture Sync, etc). That wasn't an issue for me as it is a secondary device.
Other than that Discord, MS Teams, and ProtonMail all work fine with the exception of push notifications (I disable those anyways, so this isn't a concern of mine).
GrapheneOS is fine with people using Google apps and services but not integrated into the OS and they should be on the same level as other apps and services without any special privileges/access. We're working on making this a reality. Google could implement the fallback code paths we're providing for Play services themselves. All we're doing is teaching it to do what it should already know how to do. Perhaps a regulator can force them to unbundle their services and make them usable anywhere.
I’m kind of surprised just how big this space of DeGoogled Android is right now. Far bigger than 6+ years ago when I last looked into it.
Literally 0 issues. Previously LineageOS was my preference, but Graphene is 1. Closer to stock 2. Actually innovates security-wise.