finally managed to finish this post, lmao.
also obsidian says this takes 13 minutes to read.

Around Feburary or so, I decided to try running a degoogled ROM on my phone by installing LineageOS, but this time, skipping the Google apps install part. The flashing process is as per usual pretty painless, since I already had the bootloader unlocked and was already running LineageOS with gapps beforehand. After the process, I ended up with a very surprisingly clean phone, there was no Google apps at all, and I didn’t even have the Play Store installed. This was pretty much a good place to start with my plans to eventually get rid of Google altogether.

lug’s note: gapps refers to Google apps, which need to be flashed separately from the ROM itself.

So after installing everything that I needed (microG, Droid-ify, Aurora Store), and restoring the last backup I made in Seedvault (LineageOS’s built in backup tool), I was pretty much up and running. I was pleasantly surprised that pretty much everything worked out of the box for the most part. I can even log in my Google account on Aurora Store and manage to download Minecraft, a game that I am familiar on how much pain in the ass it is to pirate on Android (I do own the game on the Play Store, btw). It worked and it managed to verify my ownership of the app (more like license). Other apps faired pretty well and didn’t seem to care that they were running on a phone without any trace of the Google Play Services, this monolith that every single Android phone has installed. Pretty much a black box that eats up battery and data that we don’t know exactly what it does. The most that we do know is that it is apparently important, and that seems to be that.

Getting rid of social media apps

If I was gonna go through the trouble of degoogling, I might as well toss the social media apps that I had installed. This applied to everything: Reddit, Twitter, Bsky, and other apps that had a mobile website got the boot. I had to keep Discord, Telegram and Whatsapp, sadly. I think not a lot of people remember that most social media apps are pretty much web wrappers designed to access a single site, and for most forms of mainstream social media, they often have a very decent mobile site. And I would also get the advantage of having access to an adblocker and tracker blocker that can also improve my privacy as well. Also there is the added benefit of not having a shortcut to the app that can waste my time, instead having to manually go to each site either typing by hand, or tapping on the shortcut on floccus.

lug's note: floccus is a cool bookmark syncing app that can sync bookmarks across devices using something like Nextcloud bookmarks.

Moving my calendars and contacts to Nextcloud

I used to keep my calendars and contacts on Google mostly because it was convenient. But it is not exactly private, isn’t it. Therefore I tried out Nextcloud a couple months before the install, and I surprisingly liked it. Using the AIO version of Nextcloud pretty much mitigated most of the painful steps that one needs to do to successfully install it manually. Anyways, I decided to move my contacts and calendar to the server, and as a bonus, I also went and moved my data off Todoist and used Nextcloud Tasks, kinda in a two birds with one stone kinda vibe. Now to access these services, I needed to get Tailscale and run it on my phone, and after that it worked fine. I would’ve used a more selfhosted solution for a VPN, but my ISP does not let me port forward or access my IP from outside the house. And buying a static IP would literally double the price of my already expensive internet plan. So for now, Tailscale will be enough.

Finally getting around to setting up an RSS feed

I got to admit, I really kinda liked the side feed that Google gives you. It manages to curate such a list of articles that it would actually convince me to read them all. It was awful privacywise, but it was convenient nonetheless. I remember I was dabbling with RSS at the time, and thought to myself: is there a way to sync my article lists, across all my devices? Turns out, yes, there was, and it involved using Nextcloud again. Nextcloud News was the way to go, and I really like it to be honest. It is easy to install via the app store thing that Nextcloud has, and many client apps support it too. On the PC, you can use RSS Guard to get your articles. Meanwhile on Android, there is Nextcloud News, which is an app made by the same people behind Nextcloud. It also works well. I like how I can star articles inside the app on Android, and then it shows up as “important” on RSS Guard.

Backups

When it comes to backups, I had to improvise something on the spot. The server in its current state is still very WIP, and it only has at most 700 GB of storage. This is not a lot, and I plan to upgrade very soon. Anyways, I used Seedvault for backing up, since it is built into the OS and it was one last thing I had to have running in the background, and the way I have it set it up is that it backs up to the SD card, and from the SD card, I use Syncthing to sync it to my PC, which has way more storage compared to the server in its current state. This is not perfect. I want to directly sync it to the Nextcloud server, but the drive that Nextcloud runs on barely has 50GB left of storage, and Seedvault does take large backups that take up towards 15GB in my case.

Dealing with Whatsapp backups is a pain

On the subject of Whatsapp, it turns out that it doesn’t like degoogled phones, because if you try restoring a backup from Google Drive, it ends up failing (even with microG installed). Whatsapp doesn’t really support anything else that isn’t Drive. There are really sketchy ways around it, of course. One method to bypass this is basically to copy the entire Whatsapp folder in the Android/media directory to somewhere else, and then once you reset everything and get everything ready (or on a different phone), you now need to re-download the app, move the files back, and then sign in. Once this is done, it should work, but it is really sketchy lmao. I really hope they actually give an official way to back up messages and other stuff, instead of forcing the user to use Google Drive, but I really doubt this would ever change. I know that the real solution would to ditch Whatsapp altogether, but this would require to pester people irl to switch, and most prefer Whatsapp anyways, so there’s that.

Issues

So microG can connect to Google servers and verify that you own paid apps, which is useful since I have a couple of paid apps that I have purchased as time went on (and I am still not ready to give them up just yet). While this worked for the most part, this did put my main Google account at risk at getting banned. Here is a small list of paid apps that I tried setting up:

I think the ultimate solution to this is to move away from these apps, and replace them with freely available/FOSS alternatives. I managed to ditch Minecraft (because bedrock edition kinda sucks) and Accubattery, as well as a bunch of other dumb apps that past lug purchased. However, I still keep FX File Explorer and Musicolet, since I am very used to them. Maybe one day I’ll get these two apps replaced with something else.

Delayed notifications

Another issue I have encountered with some apps is that they sometimes showed me very delayed notifications. The biggest offender? Whatsapp. Notifications sometimes show up immediately, and other times, take up to two minutes to show up. Sometimes Whatsapp shows me the incredibly unhelpful “There may be new messages” notification. I haven’t noticed this issue with any other apps at least.

What could be better?

Ditching Whatsapp altogether:

I wish I can go ahead and get rid of Whatsapp, since it is owned by Facebook, and Facebook is as awful as Google is if not more when it comes to data collection. Not only that, but they also recently been introducing AI into the mix, and now there is this ugly top bar inside the app. I hate this top bar. So why can’t I just ditch Whatsapp for something better like Signal? Well it is because every single person I know uses Whatsapp, and they simply do not care to switch to another app or service. If it is not Whatsapp, it is Telegram, which is an app that I like less since it is sketchy as fuck.

Move away from Google Maps:

OpenStreetMap is good, but not good enough to replace Google Maps unfortunately. GMaps has a lot of nice-to-haves, like place descriptions and ratings, travel times, and simply has more places in the map, meanwhile OSM often mistakes place names, and decides to show you results from somewhere else that is 400 km away for whatever reason. Also the available data in the city I live is pretty shit: for example, they still list a store that closed years ago as “still open”.

Stop using Aurora Store and go with an alternative:

So Aurora Store is really good, but it has a fatal flaw: it still relies on Google services, which means that if Google so desired, they can kill it off with a single change to their Play Store API. Obtainium is probably a good alternative, since the way it works is that you can get apps “directly” from the source, and considering the recent changes to Google when it comes to developer verification, there is a credible chance that they can kill off Aurora Store altogether. I could probably use many of these APK hosting websites like APKPure or whatever, and get my apps that way. But this would be time consuming since I would need to hunt the app down on one of these websites, configure Obtainium to fetch the APK file, and hope that the downloaded APK works with the app that is already installed, if not, this would mean that I would have reinstall it and get it set up again, which would be unfortunate. There is also a security concern, since I will be placing my trust from Google’s Play Store to some probably dangerous third party app distributors.

Get a phone with an bootloader that can be locked again?

I would like to eventually get a Pixel device, since those both run GrapheneOS and can have their bootloaders re-locked. This ensures that no one can install malware on them while unattended (with the so called evil maid attack). But at the same time, I am torn on this since Pixel phones (especially models that have more storage) have a noticeable price markup since up until the Pixel 10, all their past phones had to be imported from abroad, and I could probably get a Motorola phone for considerably cheaper that has the other things that I want in a phone (headphone jack and SD card slot). But at the same time, carrying around a phone with an unlocked bootloader can be risky, especially if the device is stolen or misplaced. There is the fact that in my nearly 7 years of messing around with custom ROMs on and off, I haven’t really had any issues with having the bootloader unlocked. Or maybe my information has already been stolen and I just don’t know yet.

I should mention that any Pixel device sold here is often overpriced by 100 or 200 dollars, which make it even less worth it compared to budget Motorola or Xiaomi phones, which is a fucking shame. In the following table I compare the prices between MSRP and prices that are officially sold here, and man it fucking sucks ass.

Price for Pixel 9a (in USD)
MSRP for USA $599.00
Price here $774.65
Price difference: $175.65 over MSRP

Final thoughts

To be honest, I was fully expecting something to break during these 6 months. And yet, nothing broke aside from one app. I really like the experience of not having to deal with Google’s bullshit, and now with the new announcement of Google’s plans to further lock down android, I doubt I will ever go back to a stock Android with Google apps. My phone finally feels like it is not spying on me all the time (for the most part), it is amazing. And if I can ditch the Play Store (and Aurora Store) altogether, that would be fucking awesome.

I think the future for this would probably buy another phone that has all my requirements (headphone jack, SD card slot, unlockable bootloader, has community support), but trying to find one with these four requirements is very hard. Most of the phones that I find often lack one or two of the requirements I want. For example, the Pixel phones are great for custom ROMs, and have bootloaders that can be unlocked, but they lack the headphone jack port and SD card slot, not to mention that fucking markup on the price. There are good Motorola and Xiaomi phones that have all four requirements, but Xiaomi has stupid restrictions on bootloader unlocking (like needing to use the phone for a month before being able to unlock it and only being able to unlock one device per year, eww), and Motorola historically has some hardware issues on certain devices (the Moto G4/G4 Plus screen debacle is something I remember quite well back then) as well as a history of locking phones because they were “grey market” and only stopping because the government stepped in and said “oh yea maybe don’t do that”.