The Google Lock-in Dilemma

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
  
  Let's call it a five-finger discount. 🖐️

There is absolutely NOTHING I purchased on the play store that I need. Forget about replacing, i'm genuinely better off without it

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. 😄

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

I use a ROM with microg and it actually works for all the things I need.

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.
- 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.

Stop with the hashtags, this isn't Twitter
Edit: I was wrong, my bad.
- iirc hashtags work for people using mastodon which lemmy.world federates with https://lemmy.world/instances
  (could be wrong though)
  
  Damn, you're right, my bad!
- this isn't Twitter
  But this is Mastodon (for some of us).
  Lemmy and Mastodon share content, now.
  This new nerd Internet is weird, but it's weird in cool ways.
  
  Damn, you're right, my bad!

Why do u have your purchases on Google?

Losing the ability to use my FELiCA chip is a big one for me. We use it for all kinds of things here in Japan, the most annoying of which being all kinds of things for verifying our identity by reading our My Number (and other) cards. It would also add up to an hour to any of my commutes to account for having to wait to buy tickets, etc.

Not sure I understand. What do you buy from Google? If you want to degoogle, purchasing other stuff, or through channels other than the Play store is probably the simplest part.

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.
Update: Crap, missed a bit of the article
When new versions of Android are done, Google says it will continue to publish the source code in AOSP as always.
Please disregard my previous message and confusion.
- 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.
  
  You are correct, I went back to the article and re-read the whole thing and found a sentence that I missed the first time. I have updated my original comment.
- 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.

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 :)
- modded from other sources
  True! But depending on the obscurity of the app it can be hard to find non-malware versions of such modded apps.
  Scan your sus APKs, folks! Its fast and free -- Virustotal.com does a pretty good job 🙂 I've caught a coupla apk Trojans there in the past!
- Thanks for your info. 😄👍

Its called a walled garden for a reason. Good luck dude. What's your plan?

Everyone saying you can't have Graphene and google store apps as a daily driver must have given up day one or had some important app that they needed. 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.
So in short, yes the meme is true. We are still locked into google one way or another, but at least we don't have to let them and other apps steal all our data.
- Google services are kinda like those family members you’ll only come see at family gatherings, but you otherwise don’t let them into any other aspect of your life.
- 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.
- do you know if Revolut is usable on Graphene again?

GrapheneOS is great for privacy. But the need for banking apps, working notifications, etc get in the way of me using it for a main device. Plus, there’s the dilemma that in order to fully avoid being tracked by Google, you need to setup a separate user profile on your device for anything that uses Google services (ie if you want to use the playstore even with fake google services). I just switched to using an iphone and use decentralized apps for the most part. But my secondary device has graphene
- Not sure what are you talking about. I'm using GraphaneOS as a daily driver and my banking apps work perfectly. The only 'banking' app that didn't work is Revolut but I easily found an alternative and switched. The apps for two actual banks I use work without issues. Notifications work fine, no issues at all. I don't have separate user profile, I have a work profile created with Shelter app. Everything just works. Work profile apps can't access contacts or files from main profile. Google services are only available in work profile.
  
  Unfortunately some really just don't work, you got lucky. There's a whole list of reports on GitHub about which ones work and don't work, and unfortunately, the two I use the most didn't, which is Navy Federal and PayPal. I tried both but they crashed everytime, and I couldn't get past login.
  Annoyingly, I just got a discover credit card, and Discover's app works just fine, even though I don't plan to use it nearly as much 🙄
  But yeah some apps do not like how we don't have safety net, hell, you can't use Google Wallet and tap to pay which is a downer...
  
  I did have issues with notifications in the past when using graphene, but my experience may have not been universal. But I was far from the only one experiencing this. Maybe they’ve improved it since my last time using it on a main device. It does seem that things have improved based on what you say though, so thats good.
  Banking apps do require some level of google services. With work profiles, you’re putting faith in your apps being isolated in the hands of a third party, which is okay if you can trust it. But you also can’t control when apps in a work profile stop running, thus google services may still be running in the background of the work profile. Doing the really inconvenient method where you have separate user profiles seems more reliable for privacy.
  This video speaks well about the privacy differences between user and work profiles: https://youtu.be/20C0FD7mGDY
  Edit: typos
- Oh, getting your life tracked by Apple is better? Also didn't know decentralised apps exist in Apple ecosystem
  
  Stock ios is more private than stock android. I just have accepted that I prefer convenience over maximizing privacy because I’m lazy. And yes, there’s access to decentralized apps. If I was less lazy I could also figure out how to install third party apps too but it seems I’m not the only one who struggles with that

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 programming learning app do you use ? Why not use online information ? Why buy lifetime subscription ?
  
  People get addicted to paid apps and services and then complain they can't escape the ecosystem... I never paid for apps through Google, never used Google account on a phone. Programming learning: hackerank, codewars and dozens more available for free on the web. Video editing: Kino, Openshot and banch more available for free on desktop AI chat: Claude subscription Art generator: OpenAI on web Audio editing: Audacity, LMMS and a lot more
  Oh, but those are not as convenient as your paid Android apps? Ok, call it by it's name than: you're paying with your privacy for convenience. If convenience is more important to you that's fine, just don't complain about lack of privacy. You can't have both.

I didn't pay for any Google service so this was easy for me
- Lucky you. 😎👍
- I didn't pay for Google services, but used the Play Store for buying PowerAmp, which I just pirated after de-googleing.

The thing people often dont realize is that if you do end up caving in and installing Google app services back onto your de-googled phone and logging into your old Google account - well, you're almost back to square one. Google now ties all the identifiers of that phone/OS to your old Google account and will continue tracking it as much as possible whenever it sees those identifiers accessing anything. So I'd avoid that if your goal is de-Googling, but I understand why some need it as a stop-gap.
I thought the same initially re: sunk costs, but when I actually sat down and made a list of the apps I had on my old phone and what I used them for, I could quickly see that almost half of them were already FOSS. Then checked what alternatives are available for others and realized i could actually replace almost everything. The only premium apps I ended up "needing" were Poweramp*, and a couple others I actually forget now without finding my list. Almost everything can be replaced by using the website as a web link or web app, or using an open source alternative.
A big bonus of that process was seeing on the Aurora Store how many trackers were detected in each of the old apps while i was reviewing them and it was insane. I remember one Sudoku app I'd installed years back had like 16 trackers.. Wtf. Checked FOSS options on F-Droid and found several alternatives.
*Poweramp can be bought direct from the developer, no need for Google apps, so I repurchased it via that method so I could avoid using my old account. I don't mind buying things a second time if the devs have made the facilities available to avoid Google. I recently did the same for Symfonium.
The only ones that stung a bit to abandon was Sleep As Android which I'd paid for (I use their limited free version now and block it on the firewall to prevent ads/tracking); and Sygic (gps app) I'd paid lifetime maps for.. I just use Organic Maps now, and while it's not as fancy it navigates just fine and I use it regularly for car GPS.
Things like Shazam that there's not really a FOSS alternative for but are free (with questionable tracking) you can install as a 'work profile' app via Shelter, which means it has no access to your real contacts and personal data, and can be set to auto-freeze (deletes cache and pauses app, keeps personal data). So you can use it and expose minimal data, and it can't tie it back to a Google account to profile you as it doesn't see one.
So far I've never needed a Google account on this phone, which means it's been a clean break from Google entirely. 3 years now and very happy with the results.
- GrapheneOS runs Google play services in a sandbox (rather than as a system level app) and randomizes the advertiser ID, IIRC.
  
  I'm keen to give GrapheneOS a try when I upgrade to my next phone, it's got some privacy enhancements that CalyxOS doesn't (my current OS). The sandboxing is cool and every bit of obfuscation helps.
  However unless your phone is on an always-on VPN with an IP isolated from your other devices, or you're in a bulding full of other users to obfuscate your traffic somewhat, then just accessing your Google Play account via the phone will give them your public IP address and they'll be able to tie that heuristically to your other data/accounts.
  Eg scenario: you have a laptop at home, it browses and has a bunch of cookies saved, it uses your public IP. Google is all over the web, inescapable while browsing, and through browser fingerprinting has an advertising profile saved for your device even if you're not logged into an account, this is often called a 'shadow profile'. If it sees another device (your phone) on the same network (same internet IP) regularly accessing the same sites - those devices are likely linked in their database as 'likely same user', with frequency they will be merged permanently as same user. If you then log into your old Google Play account on the phone - boom, all history for that account is now linked in their database to any other profile identifiers for the shadow profile eg cookies, browser fingerprints etc. They don't need you to log in multiple times, once is enough to confirm owership of that device & account. Opsec is a cat and mouse game and Google (and the other surveillance capitalism giants) are literally the most valuable businesses in the world because they're good at tracking users to create personal profiles for them.
- Things like Shazam that there's not really a FOSS alternative for
  Audire - https://github.com/alexmercerind/audire.
- I'm very interested in this info; thanks. What OS and phone are you using? Graphene/Pixel? I desperately want to be off of Google. Apple is not an option.
  I am going to transition to Infomaniak for cloud (dumping Proton, wtf Proton), but mobile is still a big question for me
  
  Using a Pixel 5 on Calyx OS. I was attracted to CalyxOS and Graphene as they both use a locked bootloader allowing OTA updates and keeping the boot process secure. I'd say either are good choices. I've been very happy with CalyxOS, only a few minor issues in the few years I've been on it (a tile button not working in one update, that kind of minor stuff).
  This phone model is EOL now and only getting security patches, so im on the lookout for a Pixel 8 to move to (going second hand for costs). I'm planning to give GrapheneOS a try for a few weeks when I upgrade as I've read good things about it and will have a good yardstick to compare it to now with my time on CalyxOS.
  P. S. I think the Proton CEO thing is overstated - he praised an anti-big-tech pick for the (iirc) Assistant Antitrust Attorney General (that is objectively good), and then backed it up saying he is very hopeful this person with a proven track record litigating against big tech will take on their monopolies that have been hindering players like Proton heavily over the years. His statements were always going to be taken poorly though (any Trump action being praised - even if the action was good, is a red flag because Trump is a disaster for a thousand other reasons and people are understandably on edge), and the follow-up comments should never have been done from the official Proton social media account - which is something Proton also stated, and said wouldn't happen again. Me: OK that's strike one. I'm not throwing them out after 9 years of very positive work for one failure, I think there's a tendency in the privacy community to 'let perfect be the enemy of good' and for me at least this is an example of that.

My issue is no one has developed a custom OS for my phone. Suprising considering it seems like the kind of phone FOSS users would love. A modern smart phone with an aux cord and replaceable battery still. Samsung Galaxy XCover 6 Pro for anyone interested.
- It seems to go along popularity lines. I have never heard of this phone.
  
  Its Samsung's "rugged" phone. They certainly don't advertise it at all. Its a shame because it is a really nice phone (poor camera though but I dont care about that). Probably cause it doesnt fit into the mainstream market of expensive (cheaper than their mainline stuff), disposable (this has a replaceable battery which prolongs its longitivity), and minimalist (still has its aux port and more than just a power and volume buttons).
  Ps. They are coming out with a new one, the Xcover 7. It might have already come out actually.

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.
- There's not really a whole lot of options unless you like Manjaro mobile, Fedora mobile, Arch mobile, or Ubuntu Touch that I'm aware of.
  
  Would love to try them if my phone, which was bought outright from Samsung themselves, allowed me to unlock the bootloader to allow me to try it. Might, if possible, try at least one of them on an old S10, if I can get the bootloader unlocked.

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).
  
  That's sounds interesting. I hope the movies move to that direction one day.
- Use Accrescent / Aurora?
  
  I am. But you need having play store enabled and connected to an account to use chatgtp or deepseek from aurora. Basically they were popping up the play store to connect to a google account, so i deleted them. Some apps are tied strongly to google services that they check the play store connection.
  I don't know if MicroG fixes that but i need to root my phone or some other stuff that i won't gonna do right now. In 3 months the phone is losing the warranty and i gonna just move to LineageOS.

I hear you - there's been some things I've had to give up as a result of degoogling, including access to multiple paid games and services.
It's also what has stopped me completely deleting my Facebook account - I have VR purchases tied to it.
In the end I just have to keep reminding myself that there WILL be alternatives, and in the cases where there aren't, I made do without these things once.

microG has several options regarding paid apps, about licensing, billing and stuff. When logging in into Aurora using your Google account, you should be able to use paid apps.
I mean in the end you are for sure breaking ToS so the chance of your account getting banned is non-zero, but it should be possible. Let me know if you need more information on that.
- Wow, using microG and Aurora to restore my Google Play purchases? But it's against Google's ToS, you said. However, I think I don't want to risk my Google account being banned by using microG and Aurora. Maybe I have another approach: one phone with Google and one phone without Google.
  
  I've been using microG for years for getting a patched YouTube client and had no problems. Dunno about aurora.
  
  Getting banned from Google solves your problem though...
  
  If you're living in the European Union, they can't, because of the DSA and DMA.

tbf theres always piracy. if these guys wont be fair with you, you dont need to be fair with them.

Amateurs. Why did you buy all this proprietary software in the first place? Get rid of it. Setup your own cloud services, all with FOSS tools and you're fine.
- Setup your own cloud services, all with FOSS tools and you're fine.
  "Just have tons of time, expertise, and money, you idiot, what's wrong with you?!" is how I read this as someone with two jobs most of the year. I technically have at least the base of the expertise and used to do selfhosting, but there is no way I have the time nor money to keep up with that these days, let alone energy.
- You phrased it a bit too harshly to be constructive, but that's basically the way.
  OP you don't have to ditch it all at once. Just make yourself familiar with FOSS alternatives to these apps and once you're content using those it will be easier to ditch the proprietary ones.
- Everyone has been there, including you and me. How is our community supposed to grow if they constantly get chastised for mistakes of the past? If we value freedom in computing, shouldn't we help others get there as well, instead of being purists about it?
- Because it is not that cheap to fully FOSS-ify myself here. 😅 I can't buy my own servers.
  
  You don't need servers to have freedom in your computing, just do things locally on your computer. Even phones are surprisingly capable. For a great starting point, I'd recommend F-Droid (AppStore) in GrapheneOS (Android minus the Google viruses), Super easy to set up, and it gets you everything you need. Well, at least for me. There is also a good website called alternativeto.net, If you're searching for software on a normal computer.
  Edit: Plus, if you use Aurora (google play store access programme) with your Google ID, you have access to every paid program on your phone. Also, if you're an EU citizen, they can't ban you because they have been ruled a gatekeeper thanks to the DSA and DMA. MicroG, as far as I've read about it, since I don't use it, is only needed for Google Apps, so if you don't use them, why bother?
  
  But what do you actually need in the first place? I mean it, all the stuff you mentioned I've never touched on a phone, how much worse would your life be without them?
  You definitely don't need any programming learning apps to learn programming, I know that because I've personally done it. AI chats serve what purpose? Can't you chat with real people? Art generators for what? What did you do before you were able to generate art? Audio and video editing on a phone means you can't be doing this professionally, what are you actually editing? Why not do it on an older laptop with larger screen that actually has access to open source apps that do this properly and almost as good as professional proprietary software?