DeGoogle doesn’t make sense if keeping google services and google play (this provides services any ways). For example grapheneOS as best as it is for security is not a DeGoogle experience. calyxOS would have been an option but it’s currently out of maintenance. LineageOS with f-droid basic, apkupdater (apkpure mirror) if needing proprietary stuff and maybe aurora store if apkpure doesn’t find something or you distrust it (it’ll be connecting to google play), and for them, if needing google push notifications (most of them do) and unavoidable services then microG.
Some FLOSS apps requiring push notifications allow to use unified push btw, like jami and davdroid (davx5), molly (signal client, though I no longer use signal), so no need for google push notifications, and for email imap has supported it’s own push notifications mechanism for way long (fairemail, thunderbird, etc). It’s on proprietary apps which mostly that’s not the case… Installing from official f-droid I believe gets rid of proprietary google stuff, including dependencies on google services library…
Wdym? I’m on graphene rn and I don’t have google services or google play installed.
sadly getting root and GSI all that jazz on my phone is annoying af (i spent all day yesterday doing stuff around that) so whatever. just hope that my next budget phone can have linage OS which i highly doubt but oh well.
You know they have a wiki of all compatible devices right? You have a lot of options. Due to the bootloader relocking exclusivity, used Pixel seems like the way to go sadly
yeah the only way to get my phone to work is doing DSU sideload which is dumb because when my phone reboots or dies i have to setup the OS again and download and sign in again to my apps. i tried installing a ROM yesterday i was able to do it, but sadly SMS doesnt work (was onlt getting 4G), 5G doesnt work, and APK’s wont install
You’re braver than I am, once I got a single letter wrong on the wiki ordered the model and ended up with a $70 useless slut phone that gave me an excuse to keep using play services apps 👹 at least it compartmentalized things
Everyone else w the model had to buy keys from a shady Samsung employee w Monero and there was still.the chance of bricking everything. I just caved and got the pixel :/
yeah my phone is the moto G stylus 5G 2024 (Codename boston) and its funny becuase my previous phone - moto G5 2024 broke (i dropped it) and THAT phone which is not as powerful as the stylus has an OFFICAL linage OS rom and install guide. i should of just gotten the same phone
Well, we both should have gotten in on it during the era when everything was flourishing and iOS had jailbreaks right? Live and learn. I used to buy into the purist mindset, like “better just to never scroll, desktop is better”. I missed out
This kind of consolidation will be good long-term, though, and maybe there will be foreign options. Programming is too western still to wriggle out of device monopolies
i used to flash roms on my phones. i had an android phone all the way back in the froyo days.
Not mine… Graphene, baby.
No more new hardware beyond Pixel 9 for the foreseeable future though, and Graphene’s ODM partner (if it even pans out) will be using Qualcomm chips, which is a US military contractor and not known for good security.
The irony of having to buy a Google phone to get rid of Google services will never cease to amaze me. :/
You can buy second hand phones and then Google doesn’t get any more money. Easy solution.
buying second hand phones is like buying clothes with a hole in it. your going to have to replace the battery or the phone alot sooner than buying it new
Graphene is working with a different OEM, so, we may not need Google’s devices to run GrapheneOS soon.
We we’ll see haven’t they said stuff like this before? Also look at what happened with Cyanogen rom
We don’t know the OEM and chances are, it’s one whose hardware won’t work in the west, where the personal information Google harvests is worth more.
To Google, this move from Graphene is the trash taking itself out.
Bold to say someone else is likely wrong when you yourself admitted we know nothing. Why do you believe this other than your own pessimism?
The main demographic of GrapheneOS users are in the west and the GrapheneOS team are a meticulous bunch. Why would they partner with an OEM whose hardware does not work with western cellular networks?
I guess we’ll find out when they announce their mystery partner.
I just hope it isn’t HTC or Motorola. Neither of them have done anything good in the last 10 years. And Google bought the HTC hardware team that made the Pixel 1.
Samsung is my hope. I think Samsung is big enough that they can sell certified Android phones and also open ones. I don’t think they will though. I would imagine it would be a smaller OEM. Or a shittier one.
No way would the devs ever be that based. They seem like big “Uyghur Googlers” if you catch my drift. The whole FOSS scene has been ideologically inoculated against the foreign countries that challenge the tech-finance-military monopoly that is the root of their problems. GOS is still a treasure of and it is the most fun forum to debatelord on tho - when wife sees it she thinks im working >:^]
if its a Chinese OEM im going to lol
Who else would it be? It’s not Samsung it’s not Google
Yeah probably Oneplus, Xiaomi??? or Nothing who are British
ah fuck i wish we were able to just know about all the backdoors in all our tech and turn them off
Unfortunately, Google manufacture the best-in-class hardware device when it comes to security features.
The real irony is paying Google what you’d pay for an iPhone 16 and getting iPhone 11 performance and they’re spying on you and selling your personal information to who knows who. Okay but you wiped the phone and installed custom firmware that doesn’t track you… but you still paid Google the price of current-gen iPhone and got a phone with the performance of one from 5 years ago. Google still won.
The personal information is the point, that’s the real gold mine, and they’ll get it from enough people to not care about the less than 1% of Pixel owners flashing Graphene. For those users, they’re happy to sell generations-old tech at a premium. And they call you a sucker behind your back. And then tell you Apple is the big corporate overlord you’re running from and make it sound like Apple is the enemy. (I’m not saying they’re not, but that’s a convenient story among fandroids. And it may not even be accurate. Because iOS has no open source component though… we don’t know.)
As a GrapheneOS user, having the fastest hardware is not the goal. Pixels can be purchased for a very reasonable price second-hand or from discount resellers. Apple’s hardware is indeed remarkable and iOS being closed-source is not the root of the issue - it’s that they insist on a heavily locked down bootloader, so I will not for a moment consider Apple unless by some miracle they open up their phones to third-party OSes.
wait…you think…having an iphone spares you from all of that? oh you sweet summer child.
No, probably not. I’m just saying Google absolutely does sell your personal information. Apple says they don’t. What I said was that because it’s closed source, we don’t actually know.
We do know that Apple does track certain things. Telemetry, they all do it. What we don’t know is if they sell personally identifiable information. I think if it could be proven that they do, someone could sue over their “Privacy. That’s iPhone” campaign. They certainly wouldn’t be able to use it in any country where false advertising is not legal.
The difference between a computer company and an advertising agency, I suppose.
i don’t trust apple to protect my data and sell it as much as alphabet does.
Moreover GrapheneOS requires Google Play Services to use most apps, so you’re not only using a Google device but also Google Play services! There are much better truly deGoogled alternatives around
That’s a lie, you can totally avoid Play Services if you truly want to with GrapheneOS, as it literally isn’t installed by default. If you only use Fdroid apps and have no need for push notifs, then you can truly use GOS with no Google.
But the average person probably needs those things mentioned, so you can download a sandboxed version of Play Store and Services instead.
This is patently false. I run GrapheneOS with no Google play services installed. The only issue I have is no paid app updates and some apps won’t send notifications since they ran through Google. I use my phone though mostly as a phone. I have almost no social media and I do not use banking apps on my phone. I choose to use website versions of anything on my phone so long as I can.
Not to mention, the replacement OSes like /e/os and the others don’t have the hardening of GrapheneOS. Cellibrite recently was leaked they still can’t crack open GrapheneOS.
I haven’t quite pulled the trigger on installing Graphene yet. How is it.as a daily driver?
I’ve been using it since the Pixel 3 days. Tap to pay doesn’t work, and some people have reported banking apps not working, although my banking apps do work. Also, certain pixel-exclusive features like now playing don’t work. And you are going to need to install play services or other Google components if you want stuff like notifications in various apps or text-to-speech and speech-to-text in the browser, etc. Aside from that, it’s incredible. Works perfectly.
Two years, I barely notice. 1 in 30 apps has an issue, then I click the switch remove system memory protections and it works.
It’s the best option.
I second this. Been using GOS for almost a year. One pretty big drawback is that it’s not compatible with my insulin pump app, so now I carry around a 2nd device. Some banking apps aren’t compatible as well. Wells Fargo and Amex work for me but Chase doesn’t. The increased security and privacy is very noticeable, the inconveniences are worth it imo.
insulin pump app
Hopefully it’s just for additional stats and options. Would be quite diabolical for a life-saving device to depend on an app that demands regular Android.
The app that I was using to fully control it doesn’t work, which is why I carry around the OEM receiver/transmitter for the pump now. My pump would not function without one of those two options.
Weird. Amex works for me. My banking apps require the memlock protection turned off in settings, and so does my parking app. Otherwise, that’s it.
Wells fargo and Chase are stealing your money.
Join a credit union
Everybody’s stealing my money.
no tap to pay and some banking apps dont work. but honestly, you should be ditching google stuff altogehter if your going that far of replacing stock android and only use FOSS apps you trust from f-droid
I’ve been using it for about a year now. The only differences I noticed were entirely positive.
Agreed. It’s nice having a phone with the software you want on it.
Really can I remove their browser? I hate their icons and color schemes.
The show stopers are some banking apps that don’t work and tap to pay
If that’s not an issue for you, then I’ve had zero problems running GOS. You’ll spend the first week figuring out using different profiles, the cleaner interface, installing things that you actually want. But after that you won’t even notice the difference.
I use Android auto, I have Google installed in a profile for it, everything else is clean without Google, everything works fine.
So like, you create a sandboxes profile for Google and log into that in your car and use android auto, get to your destination and switch back?
Kinda but you have 3 profiles active at once:
- owner
- work
- private
So google just lives in one and the others are clean. From a usage perspective it’s seamless
🤩
How long does it take to switch between profiles? Or am I still misunderstanding since you said they all are active at once? So like each of those profiles are available at the same time, but are sandboxed from each other?
each of those profiles are available at the same time, but are sandboxed from each other?
Correct. For the three special profiles, they’re all active at the same time, you can use them like you would any other app. They’re just isolated from each other.
Gos also has other user profiles, where you have to swipe down and swap users, those are more cumbersome, but more isolated. But for daily driving, you have three profiles you can use simultaneously, at the same time, no login, no log out, and they’re isolated from each other
For instance, you can have two versions of WhatsApp running at the same time, one in each profile, and they can’t see each other, but you can swap between them like any other two apps.
Well damn, that’s even better than I thought!
You’re fucking up, and I say that in the kindest way.
You’ll spend 2 days figuring out issues if you even have them.
It also has one of the coolest installers of all time.
Save what you need to and jump ship.
Jumped back and forth multiple times.
It’s nice, but Pixels are so expensive.
any phone over 300 dollars CAD is expensive. i don’t need 4K and all that other shit
Getting a used one is cheaper AND you don´t give money directly to Google. Or wait a year or two for the other Graphene phones.
They’re even expensive used.
They did go up a bit this year but if you set alerts on your preferred marketplace and be patient, you’ll find one at a decent price. I started shopping pixels last November and pulled the trigger on my preferred model by first week of January. Worth the wait all the way.
Timing is excellent for me. Would RethingDNS & Firewall (using both features) provide a “pseudo” Graphene OS like environment? If not, is the more affordable Fairphone 6 worth the costs?
i would sell your current phone if you can’t get a AOSP rom and get the fairphone if you can afford it.
It’s better than the default, but such firewalls are installed at the user level while Google’s services are installed at the root level and are known to bypass VPNs and VPN-style firewalls, including RethinkDNS, on occasion.
Rethink actually seems to block Play Services if you choose to configure Rethink a certain way. It is delightful watching Play Services become more and more desperate. Trying other states, other countries, and even other Google devices on your local network in a desperate attempt to get online and shit telemetry back to Google.
Same can’t be said about iOS. Apple routes their 17.x.x.x network and other traffic outside userspace, immune to even full-tunnel VPN. Android networking isn’t that capable.
I’m starting to explore RethinkDNS. Any tips or directions on the subtleties would be brilliant please
That sounds a lot more satisfying than I would have imagined. How do I set it up in that way?
Is it possible to undermine this with NetGuard? (Noob asking, please be kind)
It helps for sure, but it’s difficult to tell exactly how much, since unless you have a rooted device, NetGuard installs at the user level while Google’s services are privileged and are known to bypass VPNs and VPN-like apps, including NetGuard, on occasion.
So I would only get a false sense of privacy then, if I trust NetGuard on a not-rooted android device?
I have a rooted phone and I isolated this app.
