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If I’m completely honest with y’all, I was not expecting to get this far into the whole daily driving a degoogled phone thing. I thought something would eventually break, something would force me to go back to the stock OS, but no, everything actually worked out pretty well, for the most part. I haven’t had any major issues with apps not working, and for any problems that did show up, those were pretty easy to solve, anyways.
The phone I used all this time is the Oneplus Nord N10, which is a phone I talked plenty of shit about in the past. However, it is an okay phone, and it isn’t a phone that is unusable. For my use case, it still has a quite a bit of life left, and with the recent screen+battery repair, I think this phone will last for a long while.
One thing that hasn’t aged well is the software side of things. The stock OS on this thing is both pretty bloated with Google’s shitware, as well as being stuck on Android 11 forever because Oneplus are cowards and decided to not do shit for updates. The security patches ended a while ago too, towards the end of 2024, which means this phone is now an insecure hunk of junk now. And while this phone had a LineageOS build for it, it is also now abandoned by its maintainers, leaving a bunch of bugs left to be fixed. I guess on the bright side, someone already did all the heavy lifting for getting a LineageOS build of this phone up and ready, and all it needs is for someone who’s willing to work on the ROM. However, considering the Nord N10’s relative unpopularity with other OP devices, yeah I don’t think we’ll see another build of LineageOS any time soon, lmao.
Anyways, this post is to talk about my experience with using LineageOS+microG for almost a year know. I leaned quite a bit for the most part, and that is the good thing, I think.
ditching the aurora store (kinda)
I been thinking, with Google’s new bullshit restrictions, there is a real chance that they will make it so fucking hard (or impossible) to get apps from the Play Store. Like, imagine you’re Google, and you just pushed out a lot of restrictions that no one wanted, might as well kill two birds with one stone and kill all those pesky alternative stores, like focus your sights on Aurora Store and any front end that allows you to download apps without a valid Google account. So I managed to move a lot of apps off the Play Store and move these apps to be updated by other ways. Fortunately, a lot of these apps have alternative ways to download them, and for those apps that didn’t, I simply managed to stop using them. It is kinda sad, like I had to leave banger apps like Accubattery, or Devcheck, or some great games like PinOut and Smash Hit, but at the same time, I found some cool alternatives to some of these apps. I switched Outlook’s and Gmail’s clients with FairEmail, I also found an alternative for the official Last.fm app called Panoscrobbler, and other various apps replaced with open source alternatives.
There is one single app that I had no success either giving up, or switching it to something else. And that app is Musicolet. I really love this music player, and constantly make use of the premium features that they offer. I am kinda tempted to email the developer if there is a way to get the premium features without using the Play Store (because this app does offer a way to download it directly from the developer’s website, but it lacks the premium features), because I would like not to use Aurora Store anymore, if I’m being honest here.
“just use the browser!”
One major source of tracking is via social media apps. These apps often have a lot of tracking, invasive telemetry, full of ads, and just tend to be awful. I decided I no longer wanted to deal with this shit, so I ditched pretty much most social media apps and replaced them with accessing them via the browser. This works fine, it is pretty decent at times, and with adblocking extensions, I can rip out as much ads as I can. Of course, there are very annoying websites that will insist into downloading the damn app. Reddit, Tumblr, even Bluesky as of late, all try their hardest to convince you to try the mobile app. And the popups get so fucking annoying, that I wish there was a one-click way to block these out of existence. Maybe some well placed filters can be the solution, but I am still not sure about it yet.
Another issue that I found out, is that Firefox on Android kinda fucking sucks. It sucks because it lacks decent hardware acceleration (from what I can find), and apparently it is also less secure compared to their Chromium counterparts1. For websites that need hardware acceleration (namely Reddit and Tumblr), I decided to use Cromite, which is a Chromium based browser that retains support for adblocking, as well as having additional hardening features which make it pretty secure. However, its adblocking capabilities leave a lot to be desired, and it is nowhere near what Firefox can do. There has been a lot of times where ads slip though the cracks, and the adblocking implementation that Cromite has is pretty jank from what I can see.
I kinda want to eventually switch to something like PiHole to block all ads on my devices. Maybe make another Docker container on my server thing, and put PiHole there, and with the help of Tailscale, I can connect the PiHole to every single device I own. Another thing that I should mention, is that I also stopped using stock Firefox on this phone too, replacing it with Ironfox, which is a supposedly hardened version of Firefox, which is pretty decent.
Another unintended side effect of using the browser instead of social media apps, is that you get significantly less distractions, or at least that is how I felt it. The browser cannot send notifications without me giving my permission, and so when I pick up my phone in the morning, I don’t really see much notifications for the most part. So that is kinda nice, it gives like a moment to breathe if that makes sense. It got me thinking that maybe I should try ditching more social media altogether, such as Reddit, but the fear of missing out makes me think twice sadly.
ditching more closed source apps for open source alternatives
A thing I decided to do shortly after switching to a degoogled ROM is to start going all-in with FOSS apps. In the following section, I will just talk about some neat apps that I found during the last couple of months, so here it goes:
DAVx
DAVx is fucking awesome. It is pretty much the backbone of my phone, it syncs contacts, calendars, to-do lists, more calendars, and pretty much anything else from whatever service you choose. I decided to go with a Nextcloud and Tailscale solution, since it was the easiest and simplest solution I could find that didn’t involve paying for anything. Nextcloud does a fucking lot, and for that I am pretty grateful. And sure, I am relying for Tailscale for a lot too, but until I end up purchasing some sort of online VPS and a custom domain to host something like Headscale (that one selfhostable Tailscale implementation), I think I will just stick with Tailscale for now, I suppose.
What DAVx does is that, it syncs your Nextcloud server and integrates it with the OS, which makes it a neat drop-in replacement for most of Google’s shitty services like Calendar or Tasks or whatever. It makes syncing pretty easy, and for the most part, pretty hands off.
newpipe tubular
pipepipe
When I started my de-Google process, I also decided to remove Youtube Revanced from my phone. Don’t get me wrong, it is a neat project, and it does a lot to make YouTube more bearable, but you’re still depending on the official Youtube app, which means it still has the same amount of data being exchanged at all times between the app and Google. And maybe there are some mods that the Revanced team did to stop any data sharing, but the YouTube app is a closed source app, and there are no real ways to be sure if that data sharing has been indeed stopped. Also, I been getting really tired with YouTube's recommendations, and I wanted a kinda breath of fresh air if that made sense, maybe to replace everything with a frontend that doesn't try to recommend another video for you to watch next, forcing you to engage with the video watching more, if that makes since.
I decided to go fully with another frontend for Youtube, and fortunently there are a lot of good alternatives to choose from. For the PC side, I went with Freetube, however on the phone side, there were many options, many with their own ups and downs.
Newpipe is the base app, and many other apps fork it to do whatever changes they want. Newpipe by default lacks some QoL features like Sponserblock or Dearrow, which are very neat options to make YouTube suck less. People noticed this and they have been making their own forks with a focus with these features, and two of them are both Tubular and PipePipe.
Tubular is probably the frontend that I used the most. It is a fork of like Newpipe with some cool features added to it, it includes Sponsorblock and Dearrow, which are awesome. Sadly, from what I’m able to see, the project does not update frequently enough to counter Google’s recent hostility against adblocking in YouTube, so you end up with a couple of days (sometimes weeks) where you’re not able to watch anything on Tubular without getting very annoying “an error has occurred” messages.
Pipepipe is another alternative that supports maybe Soundcloud and BiliBili, as well as the whole PeerTube thing that only like 3 people use in total. Anyways, PipePipe is a frontend that I used to use before, and I started using again because Tubular seems to be abandoned at this time (or they have a more “only fix shit when it breaks” kinda mentality). PipePipe seems to get updated faster, and work as well as the other Newpipe-likes, so I think I will use this from now on.
obtainium + droidify
I managed to move a lot of apps off the Play Store, and for the most part, I use a mix of Obtainium and F-Droid via Droidify. Obtainium is very cool because you can get apps directly from the source, without having to deal with stores like F-Droid or whatever. I think I have something like 50 apps installed via Obtainium, and the neat thing about Obtainium is that it supports a lot of sources: from the top of my head, it supports APKPure, Codeberg, F-Droid, Github, Gitlab, the Huawei app store, and anywhere where the app is provided in a easy to download way. There is also a neat repo of harder to install apps that are curated from the community, and that you can take a look at, and get those installed.
Droidify is an F-Droid client that looks nice and feels nice to use. It really is just a F-Droid app that has a dash of Material You slapped on to it, but it still looks neat. I think I have something like 30 to 40 apps installed via Droidify, and it does a good job of keeping those apps updated as well. It is pretty neat. The annoying thing, however, is that Droidify does not let you to hide stuff that is installed by other apps, which means you need to go app though app in the list, selecting the “Ignore new versions” option to avoid Droidify and Obtainium from fighting amongst themselves. There is also that whole “F-Droid is not secure” thing that I been hearing in a lot of spaces such as the PrivacyGuides forums, but honestly? I never really had an issue with malware on F-Droid? I don’t even know anymore.
audile
Shazam is neat, but it is tied to Apple, and Apple is a big tech company that will use your data to make even more money. So I been wanting to find a good alternative for Shazam (or some sort of frontend that is privacy respecting), but the pickings are pretty slim. I would eventually find Audile, which is an app that can be used to search songs with different backends to choose from. The app has an option for Shazam, and unlike the official Shazam app, this app manages to send only the most basic data to Shazam to get the song information, and nothing more. It is pretty neat, and while it may be a bit slower compared to the official app (and often misses song IDs), it is good enough in my opinion.
blue line console
I wish I can explain how much I love this launcher2. It
grabs everything that makes Powertoys Run awesome and then literally
makes it better. It allows you to search up apps, and launch them
freakishly quickly. The UI of the app is so nice, and the app also has
little to no bloat like at all, and the animations for this launcher are
so fucking smooth. It’s really awesome to be in one app, and then long
press the home button and type two or three letters, which are enough to
search and launch a different app very quickly. Add a d
before a search query and you’re suddenly searching with DuckDuckGo, or
type all_apps to show every app you have installed. Combine
this app and DDGs !bangs, and it is absurdly fucking powerful.
I kinda wish there was more customization here however. There are no real settings to tweak anywhere, and I wish there was a way to get new commands made, like maybe get custom commands to search with other search engines (kinda like Startpage or whatever).
the custom rom abandonment of the nord n10
I remember last year, I was so excited because someone finally decided to put in work into making an official custom ROM for this smartphone. This phone actually had official builds of LineageOS (or LOS) for a while, and I was kinda hoping that would inspire more developers into fixing the many small issues that this phone had. Stuff like the charging speed being kneecapped at 8 watts on custom ROMs, random crashes on ROMs, or just getting the “app is no longer responding” issue when trying to use any apps, or how the camera’s wide and telephoto sensors don’t work even to this day…
I been following the news regarding custom ROM development for this phone. And it seems that there are plans to get Android 15 working on here, which lead to the official LOS ROM into being abandoned, and it seems any work to get Android 15 also have been forgotten too. And since this device was never popular, there is no incentive for anyone to pick up the work needed to continue development. There was a bounty for a developer to start work on the device again, but from what I can see, no one took it. So for now, this phone is essentially dead, software-wise.
giving up some apps is especially hard
One thing that you quickly realize is that, sure, you may want to stop using certain apps like WhatsApp or that one horrid banking app, life and work will quickly turn around and explain to you why it cannot be done.
I had to keep the godawful banking app, but at least I try to keep it somewhat isolated with like Shelter, which works I guess? It supposed to keep the app from running in the background and it shields your files and contacts from the app or whatever. WhatsApp is a different beast however. I need to keep that app on my main profile, and I simply cannot shove it inside Shelter, since it needs access to contacts and some media storage to work properly. WhatsApp also has a tendency to deliver notifications late, because it relies on the Google Play Services crap to deliver notifications. Apparently, setting up WhatsApp to use unrestricted battery helped quite a lot, and now I don’t get 4-8 minute delays on notifications.
I live in a car dependent hellhole, and sometimes, you need to use some sort of ridesharing app to get to where you are going, without having to wait for the bus. So I have to keep Uber on the work profile, which works, but it doesn’t really work well, right? The built-in map does not update correctly according to the trip status, the UI elements (like the position marker, the path line, and other elements like that) do not follow the rest of the map, which makes it pretty awful to use. And i think the GPS on microG always has been kinda wonky, and it only has been recently (like a couple years ago) where the community managed to get these rideshare apps working, and in some cases, like DiDi (that Chinese Uber ripoff), the app literally still hard crashes when it tries to load a map to this day.
Another very hard app to ditch is probably Google Maps. I am sorry, but no other map provider (maybe Bing or Apple Maps gets close) gets close to the features that Google Maps has. And no, OpenStreetMap simply does not cut it, telling someone to use Magic Earth or Organic Maps instead of Google Maps is like telling a Photoshop professional to use GIMP instead, it’s just a massive downgrade. It gets directions wrong too often for my liking, and since I don’t live in a first world country, it means that the data on OSM is often pretty outdated, or sometimes even incorrect. For example, I tried searching nearby restaurants on Magic Earth that one time, and the app was showing me restaurants that closed literally years ago, yet on the app it still shows up like its open.
I got to admit, I haven’t encountered any issues with apps that need stuff like Play Integrity to work, and even the banking apps (the ones I’ve used however) work just fine on this phone, for the most part. Sometimes I get notifications of the app regarding a “non supported device” but other than that, I had no issues with these more peskier apps to be honest.
the future?
As I mentioned in many posts a couple months ago, I have ranted so much about how Android now is just a lesser form of itself now. Android just feels so sad to use now, it is now full of restrictions, and it is slowly moving into a more restrictive, more Apple-esque kind of operating system. I see this list and it is so sad that the “Just Terrible!” and “Avoid at all costs!” lists grow and grow slowly. And like, this phone is essentially at its end of life, it has no updates on stock software, and no one cares enough to develop for this device, so like, what do I do? Do I keep using this phone while it continues to get less and less secure by the day? Do I hope someone finally decides to get Android 15 or 16 ported to this aging hunk of junk?
I been thinking about getting a new phone for a while, and to be honest, I think I may just get a Oneplus Nord 5 phone. In classic Lug fashion, I said “I would never buy another OnePlus device again” and then immediately said that I want to buy a new OP device now. There is also the many Xiaomi phones, but I heard a lot of horror stories of trying to get those bootloader unlocked. The Google Pixel series of phones would probably be my best bet, but those are also kinda shitty? No SD cards, no headphone jack, a “fuck you for not living in the US” price markup, it is just misery.
Continuing on with the future, recently there has been a couple laws passed in the country that I live in, that forces everyone who has a phone number to link an ID to it, and this unfortunately is mandatory and I have until sometime around June to comply. I do not like this at fucking all and I rather not link my phone number with anything. So I guess the plan may be to become some sort of dual phone using weirdo, to have one phone that will have my current SIM card and that can be turned off and will house most of the apps that are more privacy invasive, this phone may be the “work phone” perhaps, and the second phone will simply just be my main personal phone, and that phone stays in airplane mode 24/7, only connecting to WiFi to connect to the internet (maybe using a hotspot from the other phone) or connecting with a tether cable. For the personal device, I may go with a Google Pixel device with GrapheneOS, and figure out a way to get microG working on there (i really don’t like the idea of relying of a sandboxed Google Play thing even if it is probably safer than microG). I seen a lot of Pixel Folds being sold for cheap (500~ dollars cheap lmao), and those have 512GB of internal storage, so it is very tempting, lmao. Meanwhile, the work device could be some sort of iPhone or maybe another older Pixel that has less storage, who knows.
updates
- 2026-02-01: post was created