So I just got a Moto Razr and am going to start setting it up. I’ve been outside of the android ecosystem for a long time. Can I get some recommendations for anything and everything? I recently read the Nova launcher has gotten much worse since I last used it. I’m also not sure if I should do a launcher or just use the base OS. I know that there are loads of articles out there, but I’m getting really tired of wading through AI gen articles and would love your personal experience.
Thanks in advance!
If you want to go for privacy, specifically through using a “vanilla” system (as close to the base Android as possible, at most with some FOSS apps), you’ll lose some stuff, like most banking apps, since those usually require Google Services.
Also though the main app source for Android is Google’s Play Store, you can find some useful stuff on places like F-Droid (for utilities from my experience) and Itchio (for games in my experience). There’s some more places but they’re usually much smaller or not as easy to sort by Android.
I have a bias that favours tinkering systems, so if you’d be curious about something different or if I use some jargon you don’t know, please do point out.
You can use microG for apps that require Google Services, I’m using it for 6 months with no problem at all.
From what I understand, that’s still problematic for privacy. A bit more containerized, sure, but still having to make calls to Google.
Wiki: https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/wiki/Google-Network-Connections
Ah yeah, I do need the banking apps unfortunately. I used to love tinkering, and love this fresh start, but it is a learning curve as I get older. Do you have a preferred method of sideloading? Appreciate you responding BTW
For “sideloading”, I don’t have much of a preferred method, going mainly by what I can find that works.
But aside from the aforementioned Itchio and F-Droid, I also use git-based services like Github, game stores and Patreon-like sites if/when they have Android contents, through Aurora Store if the program is on Google Play only and either I paid for ir already or it’s free, and some times I even download the apps directly from the Play Store from another device, generating an APK from it with an appropriate tool and moving to my main phone, which uses a vanilla system.
Also I back up everything I can, and test them in both my main phone while in airplane mode, and in a virtual machine running BlissOS 15 (Android ported to the x86 architecture).
What? Why? There is many untouched app distrubitors (apkpure, apkmirror…) and you can evem be 100% sure by checking hashes
Some times for praticality, others for testing certain elements, others because there are device-specific builds.