I am interested in installing a de-googled android on my phone, but I would like to try it out a little bit first. Is there some way to emulate a phone on my PC, or is there anything like dual booting on phones?
If your bootloader is unlocked, you can fastboot boot an image and that will only run in memory the one time, however, it will share a data partition (apps, preferences, etc) so it might not behave as well as a native install would have.
Nope. You’ll only know how good is it when you run it on the actual hardware. Yeah you can install apps on Android emulator, but what makes or breaks custom ROM is driver support on actual hardware.
This really is the 1 thing stopping me from switching over now. I got a google pixel only a few months ago and don’t want to have to completely reinstall everything AGAIN already. I wouldn’t mind if I had 2 phones so always have a working one, but having to change everything on my 1 phone right now just feels too risky.
Do it now rather than waiting even longer and amassing even more personal data on device
Any data that’s on it is in a private cloud (infomaniak/filen) so that’s not the issue.
Its reinstalling everything, setting it all up, personalising it, etc.
I use this thing a lot and need it for work, so not being able to have a backup that I can use in case it takes longer than expected is a no-go for me.
