I wanted to degoogle since Google has been most annoying so far with S21FE. Was thinking of getting Pixel 8a but due to mixed reivews I was looking for other phones. Thoughts on this? Would be also nice if I can get some opinions from people who have the phone as well.

  • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
    151·
    7 months ago

    Afaik /e/OS isn’t completely Google-free. It just uses some anonymization stuff to make Google services a bit less invasive and I think it has proprietary software too. For a complete Google-free experience you probably want something like LineageOS or GrapheneOS

    • lemmyreader@lemmy.mlEnglish
      14·
      7 months ago

      /e/OS is based on LineageOS with microG. They did make a choice for Magic Earth as maps app which is not open source. For “normies” /e/OS seems a fine choice to me to De-Google.

    • jinwk00@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      31·
      7 months ago

      Aw shucks, the porter moved on from Lineage to develop more on e/os

      Any alternative custom ROMs that are generally considered complete Google-free other than those 2?

      • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
        3·
        7 months ago

        Idk about completely Google-free ones. Most of vanilla ROMs (such as crDroid, ArrowOS, CherishOS etc) do have some pre-included fixes for Google apps because most of the users flash them and I think they use the proprietary version of Monet theming (there are 2 versions of it). Usually LineageOS is what you go for if you want a completely vanilla ROM. I heard they’re considering adding some fixes for Gapps too but I don’t think it’s going to be anything bad or proprietary

        • jinwk00@lemm.eeOPEnglish
          1·
          7 months ago

          Should I be concerned if I am not going to be installing Google Apps (or gapps) or microG?

          • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
            2·
            7 months ago

            Depends on the exact ROM (I think they’re only really tested with Gapps) but usually you should be fine. It might be relatively easy to identify a user of ROMs like this because of mismatching device fingerprints (done to unlock Pixel features such as unlimited Google Photos storage and high FPS limit in games) though

      • lemmyreader@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        Have other comments made you dislike /e/OS ? microG, which /e/OS uses is not using Google but a replacement for the Google Play framework if you would for example need location feature for some of your apps.