Trying to escape Google’s ecosystem, but past purchases keep pulling me back. #DeGoogled #GoogleLockIn #PrivacyStruggles #TechDilemma #FOSS #DigitalFreedom #AndroidAlternatives
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.
Let go of the past, think for the future!
P.S: You bought them, if the licence doesn’t transfer you are in all right to pirate them. 🙄 There is a really good megathread on reddit. Hopefully someday they move to Fediverse. 🤞🏻
Already done: lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy
Let’s call it a five-finger discount. 🖐️
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. 😄👍
There is absolutely NOTHING I purchased on the play store that I need. Forget about replacing, i’m genuinely better off without it
Its not only in google purchases. Almost all digital assets are licensed based, you buy a license. You don’t own anything and it fucking sucks. I therefore try to buy CDs of games or movies if possible
Its called a walled garden for a reason. Good luck dude. What’s your plan?
I use a ROM with microg and it actually works for all the things I need.
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. 😄
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?
Stop with the hashtags, this isn’t Twitter
Edit: I was wrong, my bad.
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.
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
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.
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.
Have you checked out the FuriPhone? First reports seem promising
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.
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
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 totally wish I could install an actual Linux based (I don’t consider android Linux) distro on my current phone and also be able to install something like Waydroid with some sort of sandbox for it. Though I’m pretty sure my budget Samsung would fry itself if I tried doing that considering I can’t even unlock the bootloader without it freezing up indefinitely.
There’s not really a whole lot of options unless you like Manjaro mobile, Fedora mobile, Arch mobile, or Ubuntu Touch that I’m aware of.
Would love to try them if my phone, which was bought outright from Samsung themselves, allowed me to unlock the bootloader to allow me to try it. Might, if possible, try at least one of them on an old S10, if I can get the bootloader unlocked.
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.
