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Comment by deng | Hacker News Reader

LineageOS with MicroG is really not much effort nowadays as long as you

- get an officially supported phone with easily unlocked bootloader (which usually means: Pixel or OnePlus)

- get the LineageOS&MicroG bundle from https://download.lineage.microg.org, which should really be more advertised

- don't root your phone, because that'll definitely require more effort fuzzing around with Magisk and Zygote deny lists etc.

There are of course apps that won't work with MicroG, period. Anything requiring hard DRM (Netflix EDIT: according to below list, it's actually working now, but I cannot test), games (Pokemon Go for instance), also quite a few banking apps, so if you can't live without some of those, check beforehand for instance on

https://community.e.foundation/t/list-apps-that-work-or-do-n...

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Newer builds of LineageOS support signature spoofing now, so no need for LineageOS4microg anymore. Just download the official microg APK.

You also get the benefit of weekly security updates over the rather irregular ones with LOS4microg.

If you use network locations, unfortunately that still requires LOS4microg or the microg installer for Magisk module.

What are "network locations" in this context?

I'm referring to the location based on wifi and lte information. This location is less accurate than GPS, but also much faster to acquire.

Usually, Google would determine this location based on its database of networks and there's no way to set another location provider without installing microg as a system app or patching Android.

The microg installer I mentioned [1] does this configuration so you can use microg as your network locations provider.

https://github.com/nift4/microg_installer_revived?tab=readme...

just so you can see more irrelevant ads?

It can be looked at as cognitive defense. I don't want a hostile ad/surveillance system to charm me with relevance.

No, just because I find the default Google experience in Android annoying, and I don't see why they should know everything about me. Thanks to ublock, adaway and pi.hole I don't see ads anyway.

What a disingenous question, yuck. No, whether ads are relevant or not was never the core issue, so that alone wasn't the cause of his actions (btw, doesn't sound like much effort tbh). The relevance of ads is just a symptom of underlying cause.

It actually makes me feel good when I see irrelevant ads. Because it means the advertisers don't have a clue who I am so my measures work.

Not that I see many ads because I block them of course. I even use a pihole to filter all my android phone traffic and it's very effective against in-app ads on android. In most cases even the whole bar where the ads would have appeared is gone so the app uses the full screen space.

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