Trying to escape Google’s ecosystem, but past purchases keep pulling me back. #DeGoogled #GoogleLockIn #PrivacyStruggles #TechDilemma #FOSS #DigitalFreedom #AndroidAlternatives
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
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
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.
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 :)
Thanks for your info. 😄👍
Its called a walled garden for a reason. Good luck dude. What’s your plan?
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’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 gave up day one. 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.
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.
There is absolutely NOTHING I purchased on the play store that I need. Forget about replacing, i’m genuinely better off without it
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.
Yeah it’s the DRM shit. You own a music CD? You can listen it to car, computer, home, friend’s house whatever. You own digital music, movies, games, apps on platforms, well good luck.
I deleted my Google account some weeks ago. I gonna miss mini Metro and KGWT when i transition to LinageOS. Overall it went smooth, but some apps don’t work (chatGPT for example, Deepseek is more smart offers apk without play store). My bank app is working though.
But i am not sure what happens with safety. Currently the phone uses phone protect and Knox from Samsung. But in LineageOS i must find out how the safety works.
As a side note, you can actually buy music online and it’s DRM free (Qobuz, HDTracks, 7 Digital, Bandcamp).
Well, you don’t need to worry too much now as Android has gone (or is going) close source which may affect rom devs, making a private phone even more difficult unless linux becomes mainstream as an alternative.
This is wrong. Google will now share Android code after each new Android release, instead of releasing over time in real time. This is not uncommon in open source projects.
I’m not defending, or claiming that they won’t try to make Android closed source eventually in the future, but right now what you said isn’t correct
It’s definitely step in the wrong direction and knowing Google, they will not stop here.
Hmm, I think that based on your comment, I should try to reconsider using a Linux-based phone.
Android is Linux FYI. The easiest thing to do is get a custom ROM with tracking and shit removed like lineage OS.
I can’t shell out the money for another phone but I deleted my google account and replaced all the Google apps on my phone with FOSS apps. I don’t have root access on my phone so I can’t actually get rid of all of the Google apps. Best I can do until I need to replace my phone. Fortunately I never purchased anything from Google.
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.
I didn’t pay for any Google service so this was easy for me
Lucky you. 😎👍
