I’m looking into dumping googlified android with the upcoming lockdowns.

I’m a beginner-intermediate with FOSS tech: I use Ubuntu as my main machine at home, and have Lineage on a couple of old phones that I use for things at home. I use Fdroid a lot, and have things like newpipe as well on my basic Chinese handset, along with google services.

I can’t really handle bleeding edge things very well, and I’m aware that even stock android isn’t perfect. Just looking for options/advice.

I understand some banking apps etc will be difficult to run outside of google, and this is something that will be tough, but I’m prepping for it.

Graphene seems to be the most popular, but at this stage my understanding is it only works on Pixel phones. I’m also aware of fairphone. I know that lineage is supported on some Oneplus phones, but I don’t know how safe/secure that might be.

I know that most things aren’t really ‘secure’ in the sense that companies all snoop, but I’m thinking about things like banking or NFC payment, which I sometimes do use.

Any advice would be helpful, even if it’s just confirming that the price of escaping google might be giving up a lot of this functionality right now…

Thanks in advance!

  • non_burglar@lemmy.world
    61·
    6 days ago

    Do it in stages by shifting services one at a time from a google phone to a non-google device.

    (In my experience):

    Easy: pics, docs Intermediate: calendar, contacts, maps solution Most difficult: email

    I’ve been trying to de-google for more than 5 years, and email is the surprise for me. It’s quite incredible how deeply interacted google and apple have made us. Once that’s done, google account will be terminated.

  • turbofan211@lemmy.world
    3·
    6 days ago

    Sounds like you already know what you have to do, you just have to do it.

    In my own de-googling I’ve learned the more you de-google, the more perceived “conveniences” you have to give up. Unfortunately, there really aren’t a lot of all in one NFC payment solutions on F-Droid/Foss.

    LineageOS is good enough for privacy/security assuming you practice good digital hygiene. Its kind of a double edged sword there.

    A cool bonus with foss apps and OSes, is generally, their software are more optimized and not resource hungry. Meaning, you can run older devices without any issue. You could probably find an older pixel and run Graphene on it no problem.

    If you want to completely de-google, you have to leave their walled garden behind. There isn’t really a one leg in, one leg out solution.

    It’ll be awkward and frustrating for a couple of months but then you’ll never go back.

  • glitching@lemmy.ml
    2·
    6 days ago

    Imma be the problemXY guy - how often do you need to interact with your bank that you need to carry that attack vector always on your person? you managed to live without that thing for a huge percentage of your life, maybe try limiting your exposure. if that works out, your options for a degoogled life rise dramatically.

    get a used supported device that ain’t a pixel, if you haven’t already got one lying around and carry it in parallel - you still got all your shit on your main device and you have the luxury of offloading one by one use case onto the new device without downtime.

    maybe you’ll make do with just bare lineageOS. maybe you’ll need the intermediate step - lineageOS with microG which implements a subset of play services.

    hopefully, in the process you’ll throw out a buncha consumerism shit you don’t actually need. good luck.