The de-google issue is Google's proprietary play/Gapps setup which expects to have higher privileges and sells itself as nicer APIs and cloud services to app developers. Many apps can just fallback since not all regions and devices use official Google Android, etc. The other alternatives to not installing any support for them are, installing them like normal but on your non google distribution, an emulator of the services like microg, or wrapping them to put them in the standard app cage like grapheneOS does.
LineageOS with MicroG, F-Droid and Aurora store for whatever play apps you might need has served me well for years. Haven't signed into a Google account for anything on here.
VERY ironically just do NOT buy a fucking Google phone to un-google it. I really really like the Grahpene OS project but its a damn shame that is does only support Pixels and not Fairphones or phones that are at least privacy supporting from the manufacturers end.
I think "hardware security" of Google phones sounds nice on paper but you never know if these is some NSA chip or some other exploit build in that the Graphene OS devs never know about. I do not trust Google AT ALL and would love for them to support different Phones, because /e/ is does not sound very secure in comparison, they build on Lineage OS and they actually lowered security to widen compatibility AFAIK and I guess /e/ OS is just copying + de-googling.
There are good reasons why Pixel phones are the only ones supported by GrapheneOS. See the list of requirements here[1]. If other devices met that criteria, they would be considered for support as well.
The GOS team has done very thorough work to audit the supported devices, including the hardware, firmware and software components, to make sure they reach their high standards. They've made upstream contributions to AOSP, Linux and other projects with features and bug fixes to improve security and privacy of users. The project is well regarded in security circles, and I have no reason to distrust the team.
As much as I dislike Google, I wouldn't mind using their products if they respected my rights and freedoms. The GOS project ensures that more than any other modern smartphone, and I wouldn't change it for anything else.
I bet that if Google stops matching one of those requirements, the team will just drop that requirement instead of abandoning the whole project and all their work.
Which means that these requirements are at least partly informed by the capabilities of Google pixel phones.
I have to say though that the timely security update thing is really a weak point of Fairphone. Yes they have years of support but they often delay updates for many months or skip major upgrades altogether.
Well yeah, because they have no choice? Like what kind of counter argument is this?
GOS is reliant on work upstream like most products and projects are, it's why they stop supporting phones once the SoC and it's associate blob code fall out of support of the manufacturer. Fairphone doesn't do this, they keep pumping out new versions filled with unpatched vulnerabilities while pretending the software they're producing for the hardware they're supporting is up to date when it actually isn't. It's not a weak point, it borders on fraud.
If the NSA chip you describe exists, it's in every android phone. I don't see why it's any more likely that a google product would have a government backdoor than any other manufacturer. (More likely that it's an IP block in the processor rather than a discrete package "chip".)
That leaves backdoors created by and for Google, concern for which I suppose your comment still applies. It seems less likely to me though...
> but you never know if these is some NSA chip or some other exploit build in that the Graphene OS
I wouldn't be surprised if there were some backdoor in the Qualcomm chip the fairphone 5 uses or the radios in other phones. Without open hardware you really can't trust anything. Not when we know we're all being constantly spied on by the state and by the corporations who design/manufacture our hardware.
True, the limited number of chip manufactures makes me think they'd be very easy targets for states looking to spy. If they're reasonably auditable though you'd hope they'd be found out.
CalyxOS is a ROM with a similar focus and does support some more phones, including the FP4 and with the FP5 marked as upcoming, see the device list on https://calyxos.org/. It is the more reasonable choice to GrapheneOS anyway, given their recent issues with developer behavior.
It's not FUD, but simple facts. The project accepted that behavior for years - for me that's something I want to know before using software. Similar as to why one picks FreshRSS and not tt-rss.
I tried to switch from iOS to de-googled Anrdoid. Basic stuff is completely broken. Any app that uses Google location services had intermittent problems getting a GPS lock (it was a software problem, not a hardware problem, since things that just directly ask the GPS chip for the device's location worked just fine).
Worse than that, most apps use random google stuff that they don't need, and the developers inevitably forget to check for NULL when they ask for the optional google service. At that point, the app fails with a null pointer exception at startup. Most apps fix this in a week or so, but they don't add de-googled android to the regression tests, so they end up breaking it again in a month or so.
The final straw was standing outside my car in 40F driving rain and staring at a java stack trace that was preventing the charger from turning on. At that point I pulled my work iPhone out of the glove compartment. If I didn't have it with me, I would have been stranded.
On the bright side, my Pixel 6 Pro got something like three times longer battery life than advertised until I broke down and installed the Google crap in a sandbox. At that point, battery life immediately plummeted back to advertised.
I wonder if politicians would intervene if more people realized that 66% of the battery usage of an Android phone is Google surveillance crap running in the background.
> Worse than that, most apps use random google stuff that they don't need, and the developers inevitably forget to check for NULL when they ask for the optional google service.
I say this as someone who's not a big fan of Google. If it's anything like iOS development, there’s a good chance it never dawned on them.
On iOS, there's a slew of things you want to check for as dev due to permissions and the like, but there's so much more we simply assume is there based on the frameworks Apple ships with the OS.
If ever there would be an option to de-Apple iOS, I wouldn't even know where to start to check for nil values, if only because Apple has significantly moved to abstract things away to make it easier on us, and they never allowed direct communication with components to begin with, everything runs through an Apple provided delegate.
If you're OK with switching from gapps, a de-Googled android works just fine.
I've had to keep a spare googled-android around for the rare occasions I need to use lyft and Uber. That's it.
Yep, yet another thing captured. Now if you want take a taxi you have the choice of iphone, android and nothing else. Add that to the lengthy list of modern life you're excluded from (including the govt!) if you exercise your supposed choice not to us apple or google.