memes

tbf theres always piracy. if these guys wont be fair with you, you dont need to be fair with them.

My issue is no one has developed a custom OS for my phone. Suprising considering it seems like the kind of phone FOSS users would love. A modern smart phone with an aux cord and replaceable battery still. Samsung Galaxy XCover 6 Pro for anyone interested.

The thing people often dont realize is that if you do end up caving in and installing Google app services back onto your de-googled phone and logging into your old Google account - well, you're almost back to square one. Google now ties all the identifiers of that phone/OS to your old Google account and will continue tracking it as much as possible whenever it sees those identifiers accessing anything. So I'd avoid that if your goal is de-Googling, but I understand why some need it as a stop-gap.

I thought the same initially re: sunk costs, but when I actually sat down and made a list of the apps I had on my old phone and what I used them for, I could quickly see that almost half of them were already FOSS. Then checked what alternatives are available for others and realized i could actually replace almost everything. The only premium apps I ended up "needing" were Poweramp*, and a couple others I actually forget now without finding my list. Almost everything can be replaced by using the website as a web link or web app, or using an open source alternative.

A big bonus of that process was seeing on the Aurora Store how many trackers were detected in each of the old apps while i was reviewing them and it was insane. I remember one Sudoku app I'd installed years back had like 16 trackers.. Wtf. Checked FOSS options on F-Droid and found several alternatives.

*Poweramp can be bought direct from the developer, no need for Google apps, so I repurchased it via that method so I could avoid using my old account. I don't mind buying things a second time if the devs have made the facilities available to avoid Google. I recently did the same for Symfonium.

The only ones that stung a bit to abandon was Sleep As Android which I'd paid for (I use their limited free version now and block it on the firewall to prevent ads/tracking); and Sygic (gps app) I'd paid lifetime maps for.. I just use Organic Maps now, and while it's not as fancy it navigates just fine and I use it regularly for car GPS.

Things like Shazam that there's not really a FOSS alternative for but are free (with questionable tracking) you can install as a 'work profile' app via Shelter, which means it has no access to your real contacts and personal data, and can be set to auto-freeze (deletes cache and pauses app, keeps personal data). So you can use it and expose minimal data, and it can't tie it back to a Google account to profile you as it doesn't see one.

So far I've never needed a Google account on this phone, which means it's been a clean break from Google entirely. 3 years now and very happy with the results.

Yeah it's the DRM shit. You own a music CD? You can listen it to car, computer, home, friend's house whatever. You own digital music, movies, games, apps on platforms, well good luck.

I deleted my Google account some weeks ago. I gonna miss mini Metro and KGWT when i transition to LinageOS. Overall it went smooth, but some apps don't work (chatGPT for example, Deepseek is more smart offers apk without play store). My bank app is working though.

But i am not sure what happens with safety. Currently the phone uses phone protect and Knox from Samsung. But in LineageOS i must find out how the safety works.

Everyone saying you can't have Graphene and google store apps as a daily driver must have given up day one or had some important app that they needed. I'm about 10 months in now.

Graphene sandboxes all the apps, including google services. Yes, it'd be ideal to ditch google all together but reality makes that not feasible for a lot of people. Which is why graphene went through the effort to makes google services work.

You do have to download Google Services Graphenes own mini "app store". gmail 2FA works, play store/and restoring purchases works, Android Auto works, push notifications work.

It is true, some apps do not work on graphene. Mostly banking apps with extra security. There is a compatibility mode you can set for the app that reduces Graphene's restrictions on the app. Sometimes that works.

So in short, yes the meme is true. We are still locked into google one way or another, but at least we don't have to let them and other apps steal all our data.

You can install paid apps with aurora store if you already bought them on Google Play or you can download them modded from other sources :)

GrapheneOS is great for privacy. But the need for banking apps, working notifications, etc get in the way of me using it for a main device. Plus, there’s the dilemma that in order to fully avoid being tracked by Google, you need to setup a separate user profile on your device for anything that uses Google services (ie if you want to use the playstore even with fake google services). I just switched to using an iphone and use decentralized apps for the most part. But my secondary device has graphene

Genuine question: What do you spend money on, on a phone? I've never bought anything myself and I don't know what I could even spend money on.

I hear you - there's been some things I've had to give up as a result of degoogling, including access to multiple paid games and services.

It's also what has stopped me completely deleting my Facebook account - I have VR purchases tied to it.

In the end I just have to keep reminding myself that there WILL be alternatives, and in the cases where there aren't, I made do without these things once.

microG has several options regarding paid apps, about licensing, billing and stuff. When logging in into Aurora using your Google account, you should be able to use paid apps.

I mean in the end you are for sure breaking ToS so the chance of your account getting banned is non-zero, but it should be possible. Let me know if you need more information on that.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Find the least used paid service and look for an alternative. Start with replacing google drive.

Its called a walled garden for a reason. Good luck dude. What's your plan?

I didn't pay for any Google service so this was easy for me