[Animats]

I use an Android phone without any Google services or a Google account. When I got the phone, it brought up a demand to sign in with a Google account. But there's a "Later" option to bypass that temporarily. Disabling "Google One Time Setup" made that go away.

Mail is the built-in IMAP client. Browsing is with Firefox. Apps come from F-droid. Maps come from ZNavi. It's OK.

[glogla]

Sure, but sometimes you want app that's only in play store - maybe Signal (if you trust the creator), maybe e-banking app, or local transport app, or Waze, or whatever.

Some bigger apps are on apkmirror.com, but smaller ones aren't uploaded very often, so this might be a way to get them.

[moonfern]

In that case you can try yalpstore: https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/com.github.yeriomin.yalpstore The app downloads apks from the play store. You'll have to use a Google account, perhaps a trowaway account created on a different device.

[fulafel]

This article is about a third party tool that lets you download apps from the Play store.