Like I don’t have space in my life right now to do a whole lot of actual tinkering but google is pissing me off and I just remember in middle school just being able to change the boot order in the bios and plug in a usb stick and a few hours later having mint installed. What’s the easiest way to get a clean de-googled os on my phone?
Depends strongly, what phone do you have?
In my opinion, the worst Android flavor among the popular ones is the Samsung’s One UI. Notoriously bad in terms of tracking and telemetry. Yeah these Chinese ROMs are certainly bad, but where I am from, these are few and far between.
The worst thing about Samsung is the inability to install any Custom ROM despite it being a Snapdragon chip. Other manufactures like Xiaomi or OnePlus sometimes let’s users do that (albeit the process might be a little difficult).
But to answer your question, look into LineageOS’s supported device list. Pick a device from there and install LineageOS. Or better still by a Pixel (there are talks about a partnership with an unknown OEM and GOS, but no clear news on that as of yet) and install GrapheneOS.
What model is your phone? Definitely GrapheneOS if you use a Pixel.
lineage and its siblings like graphene. degoogled or with microg if you can. i think you can bypass some banks and stuff for detecting root, but it is annoying and impractical afaik. postmarket if you are feeling adventurous, it’s full gnu/linux and a beta quality experience so far.
that’s if your phone supports any of it at all. they don’t make it too easy for you to exercise your ownership over your own hardware these days, like the bios thing of yesteryear.
the amout of tinkering will depend on which device and whether or not you need some of the apps that block themselves out from running in a different rom.
honestly, you can start by replacing proprietary apps by foss ones.
It depends on what phone you have. Some phones have bootloaders you can’t unlock, and you can’t do much at all with that. If you can unlock the bootloader, your options are determined by which third-party Android builds support your hardware.
LineageOS is a popular option with pretty broad device support; GrapheneOS is a privacy/security focused option that only runs on Pixels.
Two problems:
- Locked bootloaders: if you’re not given the option to unlock it, you can’t boot anything other than the stock ROM
- Proprietary drivers: even if you can boot a custom OS, many Android phones have very unique and obscure hardware and the drivers for them are only distributed through their stock ROM.
The closest thing is LineageOS. If your phone doesn’t support it, there’s Generic System Images (GSI), but there’s no guarantee of getting cellular service after installing a GSI due to proprietary drivers.
If you want something that just works, GrapheneOS is great, but you’ll need an unlocked Google Pixel.
If you list your phone model I can research your options for you. I know overall that Samsung phones are the worst offenders for restricting your options though, along with iPhones OFC.
i can’t unlock bootloader of my phone, and can’t install custom rom, im cooked asf
knowing that the android’s ability to sideload/install apks is going be removed next year I feel like there’s no way out from the corporate greed
Actually what finally spurred me to ask this question.
It’s why I’m watching out for plans where you can build your own phone with off the shelf parts.
If it helps it looks like that they’re backtracking on that but I’ll believe it when I see it
First thing out of hubs mouth when I mentioned hearing about it: “That was their only advantage over apple!”
Getting annoyed with the attention economy and swapping to this (I love it)
edit: it’s a uniherz jelly star green edition
One of my devices is the atom already. I’m more wondering what I can do with my other devices I already have
