I run an older Android phone without a Google account. All apps are from F-Droid. Google services are all turned off. Mail is Thunderbird, browser is Fennec.
Is it still possible to initialize an Android phone without a Google account?
Is it still possible to initialize an Android phone without a Google account?
Check devices supported by 3rd party distros like LineageOS which out of the box have no Google services. Ironically Pixel phones are very well supported. Xiaomi, OnePlus, too. There are quite a few:
Without that ability, anyone can plug in to your phone and write whatever they want to the internal flash and your phone will be none the wiser.
...it's sure nice this exists and is available to anyone but it's not seriously a risk if you're not of interest to people who are willing to physically show up and bug your hardware in a way that requires quite a bit of preparation
Or maybe it is because mobile computing is just stuck, and it won't move even in decades ...
All in all I must have installed 3rd party roms on 6-7 devices with good results.
At the heart of this is Netguard. I'm using this firewall as a whitelist. Blocking network for everything except for the things I approve. So far, this seems to be working well.
It's been a great experience. Have ended up using this device more than my iPhone. Still has the stock ROM but, with the bad stuff disabled, it hasn't gotten in my way. This feels like it's truly my own device in a way that's rare these days. Main drawback is the lack of future updates.
You can even sandbox some Google services to get things like maps working.
Totally, get a Pixel phone and put GrapheneOS on it. You get state of the art hardware and the latest Android hardened for privacy and with optional Google services. That is, you can install and remove them anytime like any other app.
The issue is that it's just a stop-gap solution : we ought to strive to remove our dependence on Android/iOS(/Xiaomi) entirely.