| > Can other Android flavours like GrapheneOS or LineageOS do this? There's a separate question you're missing: what your Google Services situation is Distros like Lineage come without Google Services; if you want them, you install them yourself "gapps" is the official one. It's straight Google everything. Lineage OS + gapps will give you a very clean and nice Android experience if you don't care about Google collecting your data. If you do care about that, you have two options: 1) go without Services entirely (most apps will have problems; if you're lucky they just won't send push notifications or be able to use your location, if you're unlucky they will be flat out broken or crash) 2) use microG, which is an unofficial non-Google replacement masquerading to the rest of the system as Google Services. I've heard mixed things about how well it works, but that appears to be what CalyxOS comes with. You can install it on Lineage, but I don't know what extra hoops may have to be jumped through. Note that it's also walking a fine line with Google and I could see them intentionally breaking it at any time down the road. Depend on it at your own risk. I care about privacy and I would not buy a degoogled Android phone today. I switched to iPhone a few years ago after roughing it without Google Services for a year and a half. It was fairly awful. I once had to return some headphones because the app that went with them simply wouldn't work. I had to use a combination of the Google Maps web app and OSMAnd (which was just atrocious) for navigation, which basically meant I didn't really have navigation. Slack wouldn't send me push notifications. I couldn't use my banking app. Even Signal struggled to run in the background/send me notifications. It was basically back to the iPhone 1 days where your phone could text, call, web browse, take pictures and play (local) music. Though even the iPhone 1 had a functioning Maps app. |
If I can't use my banking apps, Lyft, Google Pay, Photos, Maps, etc. with a particular mobile OS (with all features working), then it's unfortunately not for me.
It seems like most of the Android alternatives throw the baby out with the bathwater. I get that making a trusted OS based on Android is hard, especially with Google having moved so much core functionality into Play Services, but the value I get out of my phone is mostly from mainstream apps, using mainstream features (like push notifications and location services). If those don't work, to me it's not really a useful device.
I get that a lot of these apps aren't particularly privacy-oriented, but to me, my main concern is that there are a lot of Google-owned core components to the OS and userland that actively subvert my privacy. I'd really like to think there's some middle ground on Android where I can trust the OS and userspace core, and still run the apps I usually run.