so you know how phones serve as ‘tracking devices’ and like record your location and your behaviour and all that shit? what if they didnt? what if they just made phonecalls and sent texts and did whatever else you explicitly told them to?

well, android is open source, and based on linux, so some people have tried to make that dream a reality – among them the teams behind LineageOS, GrapheneOS, and other ‘de-googled’ phone operating systems.

the idea of having the reliability, wide software base, and convenience of the android operating system without any of the spyware is an appealing one, but its not so black and white. i wanna share my experience and opinions on de-googled android phones and shed a bit of light on this aspect of the open source software community.

android’s history

android was made by some fuckin guys or something back in the early 2000s. since the beginning they were looking for investors. eventually around 2005 google bought them for an amount of money that we’ll never be able to visualize, and since then google has been in charge of android’s development.

see, android is technically open source, but its the kind of corporate, ‘centralized’ open source with a big fat profit motive behind it. yeah, the community can fork android, but because google owns the fucking planet, the community will never be able to keep up with the development speed and quality of google’s lab boys.

nor will the community for any given android fork ever be as large as the official android community.

this leaves android in an interesting situation, where its open source derivatives will perpetually be playing catch-up with their progenitor OS, and looking to it for direction, lest they fade into obscurity and die out.

this is not so the case for most desktop linux distributions, whose development is more driven by community and less by profit. there is no central, corporate linux distro that all the others invariably rely on as a development foundation (not to sound cynical – let me say my piece XD)

installation

let’s talk about lineageOS and grapheneOS. these are the two operating systems i installed on a couple of phones, and i now have about a year of experience on each. i consider them near identical experiences.

first of all, the installation is a nerve-racking pain in the ass XD it’s not like a PC where you just.. plug in a USB with the installation kit on it, wipe one of your harddrives and go to town.. you gotta be plugging your phone into your computer, running a program called adb, flashing your firmware…

and then you gotta find the version of your target OS that’s actually compatible with your phone. installing an OS on a desktop computer is pretty consistent no matter what the CPU is, since desktop CPUs cast a really wide net when it comes to compatability, by design.

phones, however, are an innavigable nightmare maze of proprietary hardware (see: apple’s lightning cable, the phasing out of headphone jacks) and their CPUs have a MASSIVE diversity of architectures. each architecture requires its own ‘build’ (version) of the OS you wanna install.

so, there’s pretty much a build of lineageOS for each of like, a hundred different phones. some of these builds are maintained by the surrounding community, and a select set of phones deemed Most Relevant~ have their builds made by the official lineageOS team.

if you’re like me and you’re getting your phones hand-me-down, then your phone will be 5-7 years out of date, and either have lackluster support that falls behind the modern, popular phones of our day, OR support for your phone will have died off a few years ago and you’re left hanging without security updates (!!!).

the experienced de-googled OS user probably doesn’t have this kind of struggle installing their shit. however, there’s probably a thousand people total who consider themselves experienced de-googled OS users, and the rest of us have to struggle in the dirt like the worms that we are.

suffice to say the installation process is unpleasant. but what of the actual usage experience?

the positives

it is completely refreshing to have a phone that is secure and private by default. after a successful installation the thing is sensible and intuitive. it’ll ask you when it wants to use your location, it’ll tell you when your location is being used, it won’t send usage data without your consent, it won’t talk directly to google’s evil headquarters and tell them the name of your firstborn.

the OS won’t advertise to you, or come with candy crush preinstalled, or perpetually tell you your icloud storage is full, or turn on bluetooth spontaneously.

for the specific type of person i am these are all huge positives and they take a weight off my shoulders. it is remarkably freeing to have a phone that does what i tell it to, and is not so rabidly concerned with wringing the money out of my wallet.

i can use my GPS, i can make and receive calls and texts, i can use discord, and i can use firefox with adblockers. generally speaking the phone manages to serve me well – mind you i don’t play mobile games or do much else on this thing. more to follow on that:

the negatives. oh god!!

so when you run de-googled android, you have a choice. with some extra effort you can install and run google services in the background: this means you can use google play (the app store), but you’ll most likely be running google spyware, defeating the purpose of your hard-won OS installation.

if you choose to forgo the installation of google services, you are stranded without google play, where the overwhelming majority of android apps are EXCLUSIVELY available. what does this imply for you, poor soul that you are?

well, android apps are installed using ‘apk’ files (that’s ‘android package’). for a while you could find apks on shifty websites like apkpure and apkmirror, but in recent months they’ve started distributing packages exclusively in ‘xapk’ or ‘apkm’ files, which require their proprietary app to unpack and install. TLDR: you have to download and run these shifty ass, broken-english-advertising-ass app store imitators to get access to the majority of apps. it stinks like malware.

occasionally, like with WhatsApp, you’ll be lucky enough that your desired app distributes their own APKs on their website directly.

F-droid is an open source app repository that gives you access to open source apps. it’s a pretty light selection: you can pick up a text editor or drawing app, a to do list, a calendar, you know the basics!! but they don’t distribute no Tumblr or X The Everything App or any shit like that. they dont even have firefox :/

no google play also means every second building you visit is gonna be like ‘install our app bro!!!’ and youre gonna have to be like i cant :/ and then have to think of a concise, conclusive way to explain that youre a total fucking hipster and your stupid phone doesnt work XD for better or worse

a day in the life

so basically i downloded firefox from like apkmirror or something and thats where i browse my socials. i use vencord (available as aliucord, vendroid etc..) to access discord. its a modded, open source version of the discord client that you can download without google play so yeah.

my sim card and phonecalls and texts and shit worked out of the box, although when 4G networks were deprecated by telstra in 2024 my calls stopped working because of issues inherent to de-googled android OS’s: basically even if android is open source, samsung’s firmware is not, and the lineageOS developers therefore coudlnt develop properly for my samsung phone. doesn’t that sting like a motherfucker?

so yeah thats when i switched to a google pixel 5 (its from like 2020 and already lacking support. what the fuck?) and started using grapheneOS.

my location services dont work in firefox because i woke up one morning and i guess i angered the sun god or something. it was very spontaneous.

En Conclusion

do i regret my choice of operating system? its hard to tell: the idea of trying to reset my pixel 5 to google OS is intimidating, and i do have my hesitations on personal moral grounds. u know me and my digital privacy. so im sort of trapped where i stand xD

if you hate being surveilled, but you love having a pocket touchscreen around, then your realistic options are pretty slim. as the most digitally paranoid person in my friend group, this is my take: make your peace with the Eye of Sauron and use a normal android phone.

the smartphone duopoly that Apple and Android hold is uniquely vicious and exploitative. there’s not much to be done about it on an individual front.

luckily, turning public opinion against apple and google is already an inherent goal of the entire anti-capitalist movement. one may hope, then, for a collapse of the duopoly, and a collapse of technological monopolies in general.