Trying to escape Google’s ecosystem, but past purchases keep pulling me back. #DeGoogled #GoogleLockIn #PrivacyStruggles #TechDilemma #FOSS #DigitalFreedom #AndroidAlternatives
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 :)
modded from other sources
True! But depending on the obscurity of the app it can be hard to find non-malware versions of such modded apps.
Scan your sus APKs, folks! Its fast and free – Virustotal.com does a pretty good job 🙂 I’ve caught a coupla apk Trojans there in the past!
Thanks for your info. 😄👍
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.
Google services are kinda like those family members you’ll only come see at family gatherings, but you otherwise don’t let them into any other aspect of your life.
You don’t need to run any binaries from Google on your phone, and still get most apps running fine with CalyxOS.
It’s not as hardened as Graphene, but I’m just looking for privacy while still having reliability and functionality.
It’s been 3yrs as a daily, works great with my banks,a few medical applications etc. Tap to pay still doesn’t work, and I don’t want a Google account anyway.
do you know if Revolut is usable on Graphene again?
Don’t hesitate for a second to buy a Pixel for the purposes of GrapheneOS. By all means avoid all other ways of giving Google money, but this is a clearly reasonable exception.
People don’t use GrapheneOS to avoid giving Google their money. They do it to protect their privacy.
No shit.
Your other post really makes it sound like you think people use GrapheneOS to hurt Google’s business model.
No it doesn’t? They literally called it an exception…
I’ve heard pixels have out of band chips in them acting as hardware backdoors
I’ve heard there’s nanomachines in 5G vaccines
That’s easy to prove, so unless a researcher has shown it to be true, I would take it as misinformation.
Stop with the hashtags, this isn’t Twitter
Edit: I was wrong, my bad.
iirc hashtags work for people using mastodon which lemmy.world federates with https://lemmy.world/instances
(could be wrong though)Damn, you’re right, my bad!
deleted by creator
this isn’t Twitter
But this is Mastodon (for some of us).
Lemmy and Mastodon share content, now.
This new nerd Internet is weird, but it’s weird in cool ways.
Damn, you’re right, my bad!
Don’t feel bad, this place is weird. It’s a good weird. But weird.
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.
It seems to go along popularity lines. I have never heard of this phone.
Its Samsung’s “rugged” phone. They certainly don’t advertise it at all. Its a shame because it is a really nice phone (poor camera though but I dont care about that). Probably cause it doesnt fit into the mainstream market of expensive (cheaper than their mainline stuff), disposable (this has a replaceable battery which prolongs its longitivity), and minimalist (still has its aux port and more than just a power and volume buttons).
Ps. They are coming out with a new one, the Xcover 7. It might have already come out actually.
Like most rugged stuff the phone seems to be aimed at businesses which is probably why they don’t advertise it more broadly. I doubt most consumers have much interest in rugged devices. Since they are usually mediocre or even bad in many aspects that consumers seemingly care a lot about. Like camera, weight, size, and display.
It’s a cool phone though.
True, yeah. My needs for a phone I feel seem to be fairly old fashioned for the modern phone industry. Unfortunately the Xcover is the only series of phone that meets (most of) my needs in a phone that I have found.
Looks like it’s actually the XCover 8 that is is coming out soon.
Looked into the specs and it’s no wonder why it doesn’t sell. It’s worse than my 4-year-old device. Sucks that you have to sacrifice on performance to gain durability. I rather just buy a 2-year-old flagship and get an accidental damage coverage plan for it.
The performance differences feel like nothing. The only thing I have actually noticed is the camera quality being worse, and I don’t take many photos. I value durability and longitivity over what I see as minor hardware improvements. For the most part I use my phone as a phone. I watch youtube on it, message people, and listen to music. I’m not trying to game on it, thats what I have a computer for. So these hardware improvements they are constantly pushing (while removing valuable features) just doesnt feel worth it to me. But it is a to each their own. I just wish there was a bigger market catering to my needs rather than the whole industry striving to turn phones into all in one devices while removing quality of life features like aux cords, physical buttons, and replaceable batteries.
Hey I wasn’t trying to hate; if it works for you that’s great.
I don’t game on my phone, either (also have a PC for that), but I’m also impatient. Anything that can lead to UI sluggishness is going to be an instant do-not-buy for me. I want my apps to install and open instantly; hell, I get frustrated even if the phone takes more than 10 seconds to boot, especially since I’m already used to my PC booting nearly instantly.
My impatience is something I seriously need therapy for.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to come off as aggressive, that wasn’t my intention.
Speed has never really been something I cared a lot about. I’ve always been kinda used to things being at least a little slow. Nowadays the only thing I really care about speed with is load times while playing a game. But boot up times I have a lot more patience for. With how technology has become nowadays, I’ve come to value things like being opensource, durability, reliability, and adaptability more than processing power, because it feels like everything is built to become expensive copy and paste waste. I hate having to buy a new phone every two years or so cause the battery degrades too much, or having to repair an expensive screen when a radio with physical buttons did the job better and was easier and cheaper to fix, or streaming services losing media I am paying for to the void cause they didn’t want to renew the license and no one else wants to pick it up. All these sorts of problems have made me choose older, slower, but usually more reliable solutions. Cars with traditional radios, physical media or downloads over streaming, etc.
Again sorry for if the previous comment came off as aggressive. I wont deny my first draft of it started off that way cause I was being unreasonable, but I tried to remove it and clearly failed. I also do not mean for this one to come off as aggressive either, so please dont interpret as such
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.
As a side note, you can actually buy music online and it’s DRM free (Qobuz, HDTracks, 7 Digital, Bandcamp).
That’s sounds interesting. I hope the movies move to that direction one day.
Use Accrescent / Aurora?
I am. But you need having play store enabled and connected to an account to use chatgtp or deepseek from aurora. Basically they were popping up the play store to connect to a google account, so i deleted them. Some apps are tied strongly to google services that they check the play store connection.
I don’t know if MicroG fixes that but i need to root my phone or some other stuff that i won’t gonna do right now. In 3 months the phone is losing the warranty and i gonna just move to LineageOS.
tbf theres always piracy. if these guys wont be fair with you, you dont need to be fair with them.
Well, you don’t need to worry too much now as Android has gone (or is going) close source which may affect rom devs, making a private phone even more difficult unless linux becomes mainstream as an alternative.Update: Crap, missed a bit of the article
When new versions of Android are done, Google says it will continue to publish the source code in AOSP as always.
Please disregard my previous message and confusion.
This is wrong. Google will now share Android code after each new Android release, instead of releasing over time in real time. This is not uncommon in open source projects.
I’m not defending, or claiming that they won’t try to make Android closed source eventually in the future, but right now what you said isn’t correct
It’s definitely step in the wrong direction and knowing Google, they will not stop here.
You are correct, I went back to the article and re-read the whole thing and found a sentence that I missed the first time. I have updated my original comment.
Hmm, I think that based on your comment, I should try to reconsider using a Linux-based phone.
Android is Linux FYI. The easiest thing to do is get a custom ROM with tracking and shit removed like lineage OS.
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.Only services I paid for were games.
Its called a walled garden for a reason. Good luck dude. What’s your plan?
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
Not sure what are you talking about. I’m using GraphaneOS as a daily driver and my banking apps work perfectly. The only ‘banking’ app that didn’t work is Revolut but I easily found an alternative and switched. The apps for two actual banks I use work without issues. Notifications work fine, no issues at all. I don’t have separate user profile, I have a work profile created with Shelter app. Everything just works. Work profile apps can’t access contacts or files from main profile. Google services are only available in work profile.
Unfortunately some really just don’t work, you got lucky. There’s a whole list of reports on GitHub about which ones work and don’t work, and unfortunately, the two I use the most didn’t, which is Navy Federal and PayPal. I tried both but they crashed everytime, and I couldn’t get past login.
Annoyingly, I just got a discover credit card, and Discover’s app works just fine, even though I don’t plan to use it nearly as much 🙄
But yeah some apps do not like how we don’t have safety net, hell, you can’t use Google Wallet and tap to pay which is a downer…
I did have issues with notifications in the past when using graphene, but my experience may have not been universal. But I was far from the only one experiencing this. Maybe they’ve improved it since my last time using it on a main device. It does seem that things have improved based on what you say though, so thats good.
Banking apps do require some level of google services. With work profiles, you’re putting faith in your apps being isolated in the hands of a third party, which is okay if you can trust it. But you also can’t control when apps in a work profile stop running, thus google services may still be running in the background of the work profile. Doing the really inconvenient method where you have separate user profiles seems more reliable for privacy.
This video speaks well about the privacy differences between user and work profiles: https://youtu.be/20C0FD7mGDY
Edit: typos
Yeah, ideally you would just use a dumb phone or some Linux phone.
Worst thing you can do is to use stock Android with Google account connected to everything (gmail, contacts, gpay, maps, calendar, play store).
Work profile is a great compromise, a lot better then using an iPhone.
I’d definitely jump for a Linux phone once they get their formula down. I was hyped for the Pinephone but realized they still need a bit of work.
No phone is truly private these days, but Graphene is the best we have. If we’re talking stock os, ios is slightly better. But I use it keeping in mind my data is still up for grabs.
I lost my hope when it comes to Linux phones. They will never get the app support Android has so you will have to run some kind of Android emulator anyway. If you think GraphaneOS has app and notification issues imagine what issues will this cause. I thought that Pinephone will at least solve hardware issues (as in that we will see a lot of clones and it will be easy to get some Linux phone hardware) but even this didn’t happen. So we still have no hardware nor software. Sadly Android is the only way to go. When google closes the source code we’ll be fucked.
Have you checked out the FuriPhone? First reports seem promising
Oh, getting your life tracked by Apple is better? Also didn’t know decentralised apps exist in Apple ecosystem
Stock ios is more private than stock android. I just have accepted that I prefer convenience over maximizing privacy because I’m lazy. And yes, there’s access to decentralized apps. If I was less lazy I could also figure out how to install third party apps too but it seems I’m not the only one who struggles with that
What’s with all the hashtags? This isn’t Twitter. Searching #FOSS for example shows a whole of not this with most seemingly only containing the ‘#’ part or FOSS but no ‘#’.
I’ll keep using hashtags for my Lemmy posts. 😄
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.
Lifetime subscription to programming learning apps, video editing apps, AI chat and art generator apps, and audio editing tools, which can only be restored by my Google account when I switch to another phone or reset.
Video and audio editing on a phone honestly sounds terrible 🤣
What programming learning app do you use ? Why not use online information ? Why buy lifetime subscription ?
People get addicted to paid apps and services and then complain they can’t escape the ecosystem… I never paid for apps through Google, never used Google account on a phone. Programming learning: hackerank, codewars and dozens more available for free on the web. Video editing: Kino, Openshot and banch more available for free on desktop AI chat: Claude subscription Art generator: OpenAI on web Audio editing: Audacity, LMMS and a lot more
Oh, but those are not as convenient as your paid Android apps? Ok, call it by it’s name than: you’re paying with your privacy for convenience. If convenience is more important to you that’s fine, just don’t complain about lack of privacy. You can’t have both.
I didn’t pay for any Google service so this was easy for me
Lucky you. 😎👍
I didn’t pay for Google services, but used the Play Store for buying PowerAmp, which I just pirated after de-googleing.
There is absolutely NOTHING I purchased on the play store that I need. Forget about replacing, i’m genuinely better off without it
